I don't remember the first days of the internet as it sprung up while I was on hiatus from computers enjoying my first few years of college. People have a lot of memories of their youths that seem to shine brighter as time goes on. Mine was of BBS's, I spent many years on line in a world that I like to think of as the proto-internet. Multilined BBS's that were in reality small fiefdoms. A network of relay mail systems called Fidonet, and single-lined systems that were run by hobbyists who were sincerely interested in their area. It was nice. The computers of the day were nice. Amigas, Ataris, and even some PC's had more character than they've had in years, or maybe they didn't and it was just how I remember it. I recently tracked down some telnet'able BBS's and I was in disbelief that I used to love that crap. My point is this, you can't go back. Just as the internet killed the Bulletin Board System, so will something, someday kill the internet. I remember being on a MajorBBS system chatting with the Sysop about this new thing called the Internet, and that we were all dynosaurs. I dismissed it at the time. "What could be better than this?" I thought. Well sometimes, or most of the time, progress isn't better. Yes, radio exercised the imagination more than TV, Yes, they don't make things like they used to, but that's progress. And yes free shell accounts are nice, but so what does that change? Freedom of speech? The internet didn't invent that, create a web page, you can say what you want, you can even say libelous things, but be prepared to face the consequences because the people you're libeling have rights too.
Okay everyone uses the same damn graphic to depict asteroid-enduced armageddon. Is the atmosphere really so similar to the pond down the street? Will the earth really resemble that at the point of impact if I were watching some point out in space? While this rock is 2 kilometers wide, the picture depicts something the size of Texas, if I'm not mistaken. So when mir crashed into the sea did it produce a similar 'cannonball' effect? This to me is just the epitome of embellishment. And besides, I'm sure that by 2019, the resources on this planet will be so depleted that we'll actually welcome the additional iron this will bring in.
I've done similar research and here's what I've discovered. IPSec is usually used for connect LAN's across the internet because it can encrypt all traffic. The one puzzling thing I've found about IPSec is that once its run, it takes over the the IP, that is you can't run regular IP and IPSec at the same time. This part confused me, as it seemed to indicate that I can't run an open HTTP server on port 80 with accessability to the outside world. Now, I'm sure there's a way around this, I just wasn't able to find it before I realized that stunnel would fit my needs. Stunnel (found here) is able to encrypt (using SSL) and network connection, so lets say you want to use it to secure POP email, you can use the POPS port(which escapes me now) and have STUNNEL sit there and redirect connections to the POP port, then you can turn off outside access to POP through your firewall, and low and behold you have POPS accessable to major e-mail clients without needing the functionality built into the e-mail server. You can do this with anything, and yes the same thing can be accomplished with SSH, but the one thing is that you need to log into SSH first, because it tunnels all traffic through port 22. Now this can be a good thing too, you can close all the ports except for port 22, and require everyone who wants access to your system to log in using a private key. The configuration is a pain because you'll have to configure each users Putty or other client to forward the connections. Its best use, I think is for tunneling windows clients like PCAnywhere throughout your enterprise and passed the firewall. As for News? I've never heard of NNTPS, but I wouldn't be surprised if its the the same. For web, that's simple, just go get yourself a certificate and follow the openssl instructions. You can even sign your own if you don't want to spend on a Verisign one.
You'd rather buy a million dollar machine than get a few small ones? I'm sure the CIO will love that. If your object is absurdity, and making it into some freaky unix journal for wierdest non-clustered apache site, then you may just want to get an IBM mainframe and put on it that Linux they're for it advertising. That way you can run 1000 linux partitions with 1 apache running on each partition. However, as a sane person, you would realize that would be dumb. Alright look, if you've got the loot to spare why not try this approach. Get yourself a solid database machine. Any kind of multiprocessor (2 or 4 proc should be fine) sun, ibm, or hp, would do, now not the E10k or that Regatta from IBM. I recommend that you get a true Unix system, because you'll end up with amazing uptime and it can take lots of load. Now remember this fact for the database: Its the I/O stupid. Well its the I/O and RAM. Get the best disks you can get your hands on and lots of em. And if you can get a gig or two of RAM. Now, your database may have specific requirements for RAID, I was told once that with DB2 RAID 5 was adequate (but that's hearsay).
Whereas I have seen many Oracle people recommend Raid 0+1. What I understand to be true, is that RAID 5 is good for datawarehouses, and RAID 0+1 for OLTP. You need to decide, most websites are probably in the realm of OLTP, but your situation may differ. Please remember: Get at least SCSI, better if you can afford it. You would be better off getting a penguin computing system and a fiber channel drive array than going with a high price unix vendor and plain old SCSI (IMHO). Now if you're just going to be using MySQL or Postgres, don't be dumb, get dual Xeon and run Linux, but the same rules apply.
As for replication I happen to work with a database cluster system with IBM's HACMP, if we need to take down one system we can fail the database over to the second machine, the process takes about two minutes and the database is back up and running. You then switch it back over when you're done doing whatever.
Ok, now I've addressed your database server, lets can evaluate your website needs. Firstly, apache (of course) allows you to handle multiple websites as virtual hosts. It does it very well. Now, I'm not sure what kind of scalability you're talking about but that's one kind right there.
I would suggest that if you've got the means, you may want to look at an application server that's based on apache. Such as Oracle's or Websphere. It may make administering a ton of web addresses easier.
You want to stay away from clustering? Why? To save on administration costs? But yet you're entertaining an E10k.... I don't get it. Since I don't think your server consolidation is a smart move I'm going to propose this: IBM and Sun and HP (HP just came out with a really inexpensive rack mounted 1U Unix machine) all have small 1U webservers. But honestly, those systems are great for databases, where you may want to get the extra performance of specialized hardware, but you could do quite will with a rack full of dual processor Xeons running redhat. (this would be where an app server would be a good idea because a lot of them feature cloning so you don't have to copy all the new html over with each change) With all the modules and the native ability to compile it from scratch I think you're better off.
What you would do probably then is load balance them with Round Robin DNS (there's some expensive hardware load balancers that I'm not too familliar with that you can buy too) look it up, its very simple IP based load balancing from the DNS. Remember also, that if you're looking to get 10 mil hits a month you're going to need bandwidth (I'd guess a DS3?) to support that. This is of course my opinion, I have administered and set up the webserver and databases for several companies, and I've never figured out a really good answer to this problem of scalability, except to keep open the possibility of future growth (although there are some pretty specific formulas for capacity planning for databases). You're making a huge hardware investment, you need to keep that in mind too, if you need 2 CPU's then get the capability for four, etc. Keep in mind that companies grow (hopefully) and the CXO's that are approving this purchase won't like it if next week you come down and say Oh sorry, we need to get the E15k the E10k wasn't enough (but they won't dislike it so much if its 'only' a 5k XEON system you're getting). Also, let me say this try to get a professional opinion from someone say, not on slashdot (the problem is obviously where, vendors will lie, so will consultants) . If you're spending megabucks, you may have to defend your suggestion at some point, and telling em, 'Um, this guy on slashdot said it would be cool.' never really pans out.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the oracle certification bundle that they sold for 9i where you can get all four classes for the price of 2, and now there's five? Will they up the classes in that special offer? I think it was good until August. I'm just speculating here, but I'm wondering if they lost money off of that and decided to make things more difficult. It would also seem that they're trying to make up for that whole California shortfall, but that's just a guess.
Something like this will completely change the dynamics of war. The future of warfare is robotic infantry and special forces enfused with nanomachine armor. I think its a mostly great thing. It seems to me, that the closest thing to peace is a war without casualties. War is an inevitability and if modern technology can provide a way for soldiers to sit in a safe location and control their mechanical counterparts and defend our country I think that's great. But we do run the risk of turning warfare into nothing more than a giant video game. Politicians may be too quick to act without that barrier of the enormous casualties that modern warfare brings with it. What worries me even more is that I think it can be empirically proven that the younger the people the better they are at video games. Faster hand/eye coordination, etc. Is it such a large mental jump to think that special drafts might be instituted to get the best of these new soldiers from the ranks of under-18 year olds? Perhaps this thought doesn't hold up, but it seems like a logical progression to me.
I don't know what their future plans are but I've used it as a quick way to get news. It reminds me of old BBS's in that its basically text menu driven, and where else in the modern age can you find ascii art? I think its pretty cool that they've taken what is essentially a proprietary platform that is, well lets face it, being used as Microsoft Windows is to dominate the world and turned it into something that they control. I think the only reason its being targeted to kids is that its called "SmarterChild". I mean if these kids are going to want to get stock quotes, search the bible, or read reuters news then more power to them. People can't be so afraid of advertising, in fact if people were less afraid of advertising I could still get e-mail for free.
Reboot problem solved long ago, called Unix.
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No More Rebooting?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Honestly, at the risk of sounding cliche, real unix systems, that are bound to their hardware have fantastic uptime. The RS6000 we've had for a year has only been taken down for failover testing. If the resolution is hardware based then this Wintel duopoly isn't of much use. But the biggest question is, what will help desk people do if they can't tell people "Reboot the system." to take care of the problem. The vast majority of them may actually have to be trained in technical problem resolution. Millions will be thrown out of work (because it obviously exceeds their capabilities). Its the fragile nature of Windows that keeps the economy moving! Hopefully they will rethink this before its too late.
My opinion of Thomas Edison was forever altered when I read about one of his inventions, the electric chair It was an invention to show how dangerous AC current was by associating in the public's mind the horrible execution of people with Westinghouse's AC power, rather than the more benign DC that Edison was hawking. As for the spirit of invention in the old days, it was quite a marvel that he was able to do so many things, but thankfully in this internet revolution, with all its new inventions, there's no comparison to an electric chair. No modern death by spam, (although, slow death by cellphone may be an option) or the like. However, you must appreciate that he was one man that changed the world in a way that it would take the entire internet to do.
When you had that story about Parrot (Perl and Python merging) that was pretty cool, but this year's were rediculous. Nothing really stood out. An april's fool joke is supposed to actually try to fool you. The only one that remotely comes close is maybe the Wil Wheaton one because it could possibly be true. UPN has never exactly proven its judgement in such things. What's the deal with that too? Is he becoming the Open Source's answer to Danny Bonaduce? Will he be going on celebrity boxing any time soon? Wil Wheaton OS, etc, its all a bit much. Obviously they can't all be onion articles, but they could be mildly amusing. Perhaps you should have used the same critieria that keeps bad submissions off slashdot normally and applied it to the ones that you put up instead of just taking anyone and everyone's april fools day message.
I've recently had to install a remote access situation at work for a bunch of consultants working on a project. We have non-public IPs for our inhouse machines and a couple of webservers with public IP's and then I discovered the magic of SSH port forwarding. We were able to forward PCAnywhere as well as several other TCP ports (the one drawback of SSH is that you can't forward UDP ports) that allowed them to use client programs across the internet without compromising security. In fact its worked too well and almost everyone in the department has asked me to set up their system for PCAnywhere over SSH. Its a poor-man's VPN (which you would use to do it right). But with SSH you can forward VNC and X-Windows, and of course you have your SSH for your unix systems. Does it work well? Well that depends on your bandwidth. Lots of bandwidth makes everything more palatable.
I've got some swampland on mars for sale...
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Lots of Ice On Mars
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· Score: 1
This is a wonderful discovery, however, I thought we've suspected for some time that there's polar ice-caps though. And so those clouds that the rover saw sometime ago could in fact have been water clouds(I think they thought it was some other toxic substance)? So the fact that there's water and that we seem to be heading towards a future of profitable martian water companies. So what's missing is a greenhouse effect to make the temperature go up. I believe that this could solved by declaring Mars to be a smoking zone. The dwindling smoking areas on earth should produce the kind of tourism that would make martian exploration possible. Imagine the kind of funding that would be given by philip morris. We'd additionally eliminate the health threats of second hand smoking on earth by shipping them all out there and raise the temperature on mars by several degrees (Something on the order of Buffalo in February). It'll also make a nice dump site for our nuclear waste. Mars, the landfill of the solar system.
I cannot dispute that they have many many talented people working at IBM. I, however, do think that its a negative development that two monoliths are producing their own versions of Linux, if its more than just a branding they run the risk of forking. Besides, there were already working versions of Redhat and I think at least one other distro and now that revenue stream will be gone for those companies. No one will elect to use Redhat's OS/390 version of Linux over IBM's. Its kinda like how ma and pop organizations are effected when a Walmart comes to town. Don't forget IBM also makes many other architectures, and can stake a claim to having unique insight into everything from the AS/400 down to PowerPC systems, I do not see that as a valid excuse for attempting to crush every other vendor in these areas.
The same goes for Sun, if they make a sparc version of linux, what about the other guys who might be targetting their distros at the sparc architecture? Gone. Its not all bad news, it does mean that linux has come of age in the enterprise server world.
There's an article here on cnet news that explains the whole thing. They don't want you to go after the much more powerful and robust linux system that IBM has and go for their version of Linux for smaller systems. The alarming thing is that they are producing their OWN version of Linux, not using Redhat or another company. And also IBM I understand is doing this too. This can't be a good thing for linux at all. Proprietary versions of linux? Or perhaps some people think it'd be okay if its just branded, I just don't think its a good idea at all. I think they want to utilize the benefits of linux however they do not want to allow Linux to creep into the larger servers where Sun dominates. And IBM which has AIX 5L (AIX w/linux compatibility) and now a special Linux for the mainframe it directly challenges their most valuable property, solaris which is valuable because all that software is made for it which makes people buy sun systems. You find the program you need to run and then look at the systems running it, and unless you're already running AIX or HP-UX your first choice is probably Sun (and sun is usually always a choice). Now Linux comes in, becomes this pervasive server software and Solaris doesn't really look as hot as it did anymore.
More often than not with a database your bottleneck is I/O. When you run a database you cannot have enough disks, and you cannot have enough FAST disks. In order to accomplish the kind of I/O bandwidth that a place like google is going to need you're going to need the best EMC arrays (or perhaps an IBM Shark) money can buy. And guess what? They run you megabucks. You can't just take a bunch of SCSI disks and expect them to perform as well as Fibre channel arrays. You gotta have controllers with multiple caches. Everyone who's never dealt with databases think that SCSI is the beginning and the end of hard drives, and its so far from being the truth its not funny.
I've really no idea how complex the queries are or whether or not they use a relational database but that being said its still has to hit the disk to retrieve the data and that's where every decently designed database's bottleneck is. Besides google caches all its pages. Egads! Do you have any idea how much RAM they must need for just that alone? Yes RAM is faster. Oracle even teaches you to try to keep your frequently used tables in cache anyhow, because its fastest, of course they qualify that with the word small realizing that most people don't have the gobs of memory needed to cache large tables.
I think what happened to netscape was a terrible thing, and I'd hate to see the same fate befall Linux, and really the flagship line of linux is Redhat, so as Redhat goes so goes linux. I can only imagine that they've got planned some new cable-box with linux and web access, to trump Xbox's console. On the other hand this combination would most likely eventually provide a user-friendly system that sat on top of linux. The simple fact that AOL has millions of subscribers and Time Warner also has millions of subscribers could conceivably destroy the desktop OS monopoly held by microsoft in several small steps. However, I've long believed that this need by the linux user community to enter the desktop arena is a rediculous one that will do nothing but undermine the idea that Linux is a server strength OS, something that it has achieved after a long struggle. (There's enough people already prejudiced by its open source nature) I can only hope is that this merger will not happen because Linux will lose its credibility in the server arena.
First of all, everything's fairly logical and shouldn't shock anyone. The economy's contracting, negative growth, and that means companies are getting smaller, firing workers, or going out of business all together if their fundamental's weren't solid (remember a rising tide lifts all boats, but the tide isn't rising.) So they have fewer people, need fewer technical support people, and perhaps put those programming projects on hold. In general it would seem a recession hits techs hard. That being said, the free-fall in the stock market that started drying up all the venture capital began about 2 years ago this April. If memory serves just about all the domains are rented for two years, at least it was the way it was done two years ago. Since things haven't turned around, no one will be renewing them. Remember, a great deal of dotcom names are tied to company names. If they don't exist anymore they too will go away. And if the economy stagnates, or continues to go down there will not be new registries. Personal sites may fill in the gap, but how many web developers can their be in the world 10 million? How many of them don't already have their own personal pages? So it is not a rosey outlook at all. However even though the internet is doomed to be smaller in this sense, it doesn't mean that this has anything to do job prospects for techies (or mean that the internet will implode like a reverse big bang). Whatever has failed, will lose their registry. Also remember most of those "dotcoms" took out TONS of domain names (at least the one I worked at did) figuring the cash to roll it out would follow. My feeling is that we work in an elastic sector and when the companies go back to making server and software purchases they will have to hire people to utilize them, regardless of how many domains exist in the world.
I feel safer at night knowing that our technology is so advanced that we can even track Santa clause. But I'm worried about the cost to the economy because of all the money outlayed because of Santa. The amount of money we spent to irradiate the mail that was sent to him, and I presume he will be given an F15 fighter jet escort because of the hightened state of security. I think the cost of this far surpasses the cost of toys for every girl and boy. But there's an opportunity for santa to repay us. He knows when people are sleeping you know, and when they're awake, and obviously he knows where everyone is, so why doesn't the FBI find out from him where Bin Laden is? I mean think of all the free publicity cocoa-cola and other American companies give him over the years, the least he can do for the country is help our war effort. I personally would support covert military action at the north pole to find Santa Clause and find out what he knows, and while they're at it they should get some of that technology that he has. Especially that part in that poem,
"..And laying his finger aside of his nose, And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;"
That I think could be very useful in those caves of Tora Bora.
I haven't seen that many warnings since the last time I turned on CNBC. There's a great advertisement for MySQL. The Postgresql fans must be very happy. Apparently everyone needs an enterprise class database if they're getting slashdotted.
Xbox went for the same strategy as PS2, build up artificial demand by limiting the amount available after its release. They didn't want to be jerks about it like Sony, so they made it somewhat more available. Nintendo smartly identified that putting out as many units as possible would make a better statement, by comparison, after all with the Xbox's sold out and timmy at home wanting a game machine, they should get an upsurge in sales. Anyhow it won't help, anything built in the shape of a cube is doomed from the start.
It should be a great concern to everyone when governments try to curtail any sort of research, as science is neither innately evil, nor is it innately beneficial. It is only the way that the science is applied that it turns to be one or the other. The cloning of humans is filled with perils, but not allowing science to progress down a particular avenue is a much more serious problem. This is science with the potential to save millions of lives. How many people will we be dooming by not pursuing it? This is a stark contrast the development of nuclear weapons, which was science developed for the expressed use of killing millions. That presented a much graver problem to our society, and yet nuclear weapons could be argued to have stopped any other world wars from happening which is an incredibly positive situation.
The real problem here isn't that this science is harmful, god knows it is much less so than most other things under development or in production, but that it goes against the moral grain of those in power. The paradox is that while we can accept those inventions that kill life, those that create life are far more scarey to a great many more people. We should have more faith in ourselves, and our ability to regulate this industry to the extent that it will not become harmful to society. Its a great opportunity for science and it should not be precluded.
Boy oh boy. It's not bad enough that we go nukes to destroy the earth now we're going to have man-made asteroids. Good thing its re-usable those one way ICBMs are so expensive. Now how long before Dr. Evil puts his laser on the moon?
Well, Superpowers have to stay ahead of the technology curve or risk falling behind to upstarts. While I appreciate anything that gets that kind of technology developed, obviously the application is not good. Certainly it's the military that has always lead the way in technological advances in exploration technology (the submarine and sonar for instance). This will possibly go down as one more example our contradictory society.
Personally, I find the idea of boulders dropping from space a helluva lot more scary than boring old nukes.
So have a bannana and prepare yourself for our future ape overlords.
There's certainly no shortage of programmer now.
Yes a lot of H1-B visa people are being hired. No one has the motivation that they do. Take the Indian H1-B workers (please). In their high school they're taught every "money making" in demand program out there. American companies open up corporations in India which the only responsibility is to recruit. They come over here, making 40k a year. The average salary over there is a fraction of that. Additionally they're the hope of their town or village. Since they're the creme of the crop, they have a chip on their shoulders. In my experience their impression of American programmers aren't very high. They're a tight nit group and always network. Meanwhile, the company owns their visa, so they don't run to another job for a few dollars more, which is a rampant attribute of american programmers. So by default they're much more difficult to recruit and retain.
But then again this is how it used to be.
Right now there's so many out of work american programmers that any stable company should have their pick of all-stars. Unfortunately the layoffs and the hiring freeze has had a huge impact on H1B Visas... Most of them are being forced to go home and of course its a great shame to them. Most of the computer jobs that exist there were either at american companies, or companies that got their money from american companies that hired them for jobs. Its tougher for them than it is for us. Additionally those all-star all-americans are having enough trouble finding work, but they'll be picked before the H1-B visas.
I don't think we can blame the countries that send them, and mostly its the individual that's trying for a better life, and only a small amount of blame exists on the opportunist companies, the real blame is that the stigma surrounding being a "nerd" has, for so many years preceding the boom, made the numbers of technical people drop by so much that they couldn't ramp up to produce the workers. But boom times are over and equillibrium is beginning to take place.
As convenient as it must be for die hard C programmers to write shell scripts in a C like language, honestly it would seem to me that they could pick up perl in a day and any shell scripting language in a couple of hours. In fact I would be shocked if they haven't already. And as much as I appreciate the freedom of innovation that people think they have creating new programming languages, just because they found another way to spell FOR doesn't mean they have the right to give birth to language. The people who are coming up with these web languages and scripting languages that pop up on freshmeat probably dream of the day when their language has their own O'Reilly animal/vegatible/other book. But do they really make the computing world a better place? Sure some languages with good ideas can start from no where and build momentum, like PHP for example. But it was innovative for its time, with its preprocessor inside of apache. And then it kept on innovating. Rebol is another example, probably the easiest language to get accustomed to, ever. You can change the language to your own syntax. That's some kind of an advance. That's what really needs to be the test for a new language. If you're not doing something new then what's the point?
Personally I'm waiting for ASM-shell, why use perl to do assembler's work. Perhaps I'll try to write it myself. Then maybe someday I can get the chupacabra on my language's O'Reilly Book.
If a rumor was posted on that site's main page its all but released for public knowledge. Its very difficult times. The crash is starting to close down some of the best known websites, like we saw last week with Suck.com. The problem with open source is that there's no money in it. I believe one of the much touted ways companies were going to make money off of open source was to provide support and consulting for the software. These companies never really sprung up. What ended up happening was that it opened access to these extremely advanced systems to the public which learned them, and then went off to work at websites. Consulting co's could have formed a nucleus of an open source market. Instead we got caffienated beverages sponsoring the websites.
VALinux being a hardware supplier will of course suffer sales slowdowns with the rest of the market. Those kinds of servers, like VALinux and Penguin Computing make are for websites and NOCs, and so many IT budgets are frozen. So what happens when bastions of freedom suddenly need money? Will slashdot sell out? And by that I mean will we start seeing animercials ala zdnet? Possibly a licensing fee for slash code? Perhaps slashdot can sell moderation points on ebay? Will we need to accompany our link submissions with a 20 dollar processing fee? I'm of course kidding, I'm sure Slashdot's much too respectable for that, but it must be one of the highest trafficked sites that VALinux owns, and possibly on the internet period. Unfortunately it looks that the only company making money off the internet is AOL.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't remember the first days of the internet as it sprung up while I was on hiatus from computers enjoying my first few years of college. People have a lot of memories of their youths that seem to shine brighter as time goes on. Mine was of BBS's, I spent many years on line in a world that I like to think of as the proto-internet. Multilined BBS's that were in reality small fiefdoms. A network of relay mail systems called Fidonet, and single-lined systems that were run by hobbyists who were sincerely interested in their area. It was nice. The computers of the day were nice. Amigas, Ataris, and even some PC's had more character than they've had in years, or maybe they didn't and it was just how I remember it. I recently tracked down some telnet'able BBS's and I was in disbelief that I used to love that crap. My point is this, you can't go back. Just as the internet killed the Bulletin Board System, so will something, someday kill the internet. I remember being on a MajorBBS system chatting with the Sysop about this new thing called the Internet, and that we were all dynosaurs. I dismissed it at the time. "What could be better than this?" I thought. Well sometimes, or most of the time, progress isn't better. Yes, radio exercised the imagination more than TV, Yes, they don't make things like they used to, but that's progress. And yes free shell accounts are nice, but so what does that change? Freedom of speech? The internet didn't invent that, create a web page, you can say what you want, you can even say libelous things, but be prepared to face the consequences because the people you're libeling have rights too.
Okay everyone uses the same damn graphic to depict asteroid-enduced armageddon. Is the atmosphere really so similar to the pond down the street? Will the earth really resemble that at the point of impact if I were watching some point out in space? While this rock is 2 kilometers wide, the picture depicts something the size of Texas, if I'm not mistaken. So when mir crashed into the sea did it produce a similar 'cannonball' effect? This to me is just the epitome of embellishment. And besides, I'm sure that by 2019, the resources on this planet will be so depleted that we'll actually welcome the additional iron this will bring in.
I've done similar research and here's what I've discovered.
IPSec is usually used for connect LAN's across the internet because it can encrypt all traffic. The one puzzling thing I've found about IPSec is that once its run, it takes over the the IP, that is you can't run regular IP and IPSec at the same time. This part confused me, as it seemed to indicate that I can't run an open HTTP server on port 80 with accessability to the outside world. Now, I'm sure there's a way around this, I just wasn't able to find it before I realized that stunnel would fit my needs.
Stunnel (found here) is able to encrypt (using SSL) and network connection, so lets say you want to use it to secure POP email, you can use the POPS port(which escapes me now) and have STUNNEL sit there and redirect connections to the POP port, then you can turn off outside access to POP through your firewall, and low and behold you have POPS accessable to major e-mail clients without needing the functionality built into the e-mail server. You can do this with anything, and yes the same thing can be accomplished with SSH, but the one thing is that you need to log into SSH first, because it tunnels all traffic through port 22. Now this can be a good thing too, you can close all the ports except for port 22, and require everyone who wants access to your system to log in using a private key. The configuration is a pain because you'll have to configure each users Putty or other client to forward the connections. Its best use, I think is for tunneling windows clients like PCAnywhere throughout your enterprise and passed the firewall. As for News? I've never heard of NNTPS, but I wouldn't be surprised if its the the same. For web, that's simple, just go get yourself a certificate and follow the openssl instructions. You can even sign your own if you don't want to spend on a Verisign one.
You'd rather buy a million dollar machine than get a few small ones? I'm sure the CIO will love that. If your object is absurdity, and making it into some freaky unix journal for wierdest non-clustered apache site, then you may just want to get an IBM mainframe and put on it that Linux they're for it advertising. That way you can run 1000 linux partitions with 1 apache running on each partition.
However, as a sane person, you would realize that would be dumb. Alright look, if you've got the loot to spare why not try this approach.
Get yourself a solid database machine. Any kind of multiprocessor (2 or 4 proc should be fine) sun, ibm, or hp, would do, now not the E10k or that Regatta from IBM. I recommend that you get a true Unix system, because you'll end up with amazing uptime and it can take lots of load. Now remember this fact for the database:
Its the I/O stupid.
Well its the I/O and RAM. Get the best disks you can get your hands on and lots of em. And if you can get a gig or two of RAM. Now, your database may have specific requirements for RAID, I was told once that with DB2 RAID 5 was adequate (but that's hearsay).
Whereas I have seen many Oracle people recommend Raid 0+1. What I understand to be true, is that RAID 5 is good for datawarehouses, and RAID 0+1 for OLTP. You need to decide, most websites are probably in the realm of OLTP, but your situation may differ. Please remember: Get at least SCSI, better if you can afford it. You would be better off getting a penguin computing system and a fiber channel drive array than going with a high price unix vendor and plain old SCSI (IMHO). Now if you're just going to be using MySQL or Postgres, don't be dumb, get dual Xeon and run Linux, but the same rules apply.
As for replication I happen to work with a database cluster system with IBM's HACMP, if we need to take down one system we can fail the database over to the second machine, the process takes about two minutes and the database is back up and running. You then switch it back over when you're done doing whatever.
Ok, now I've addressed your database server, lets can evaluate your website needs.
Firstly, apache (of course) allows you to handle multiple websites as virtual hosts. It does it very well. Now, I'm not sure what kind of scalability you're talking about but that's one kind right there.
I would suggest that if you've got the means, you may want to look at an application server that's based on apache. Such as Oracle's or Websphere. It may make administering a ton of web addresses easier.
You want to stay away from clustering? Why? To save on administration costs? But yet you're entertaining an E10k.... I don't get it.
Since I don't think your server consolidation is a smart move I'm going to propose this:
IBM and Sun and HP (HP just came out with a really inexpensive rack mounted 1U Unix machine) all have small 1U webservers. But honestly, those systems are great for databases, where you may want to get the extra performance of specialized hardware, but you could do quite will with a rack full of dual processor Xeons running redhat. (this would be where an app server would be a good idea because a lot of them feature cloning so you don't have to copy all the new html over with each change) With all the modules and the native ability to compile it from scratch I think you're better off.
What you would do probably then is load balance them with Round Robin DNS (there's some expensive hardware load balancers that I'm not too familliar with that you can buy too) look it up, its very simple IP based load balancing from the DNS.
Remember also, that if you're looking to get 10 mil hits a month you're going to need bandwidth (I'd guess a DS3?) to support that.
This is of course my opinion, I have administered and set up the webserver and databases for several companies, and I've never figured out a really good answer to this problem of scalability, except to keep open the possibility of future growth (although there are some pretty specific formulas for capacity planning for databases). You're making a huge hardware investment, you need to keep that in mind too, if you need 2 CPU's then get the capability for four, etc. Keep in mind that companies grow (hopefully) and the CXO's that are approving this purchase won't like it if next week you come down and say Oh sorry, we need to get the E15k the E10k wasn't enough (but they won't dislike it so much if its 'only' a 5k XEON system you're getting). Also, let me say this try to get a professional opinion from someone say, not on slashdot (the problem is obviously where, vendors will lie, so will consultants) . If you're spending megabucks, you may have to defend your suggestion at some point, and telling em, 'Um, this guy on slashdot said it would be cool.' never really pans out.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the oracle certification bundle that they sold for 9i where you can get all four classes for the price of 2, and now there's five? Will they up the classes in that special offer? I think it was good until August. I'm just speculating here, but I'm wondering if they lost money off of that and decided to make things more difficult. It would also seem that they're trying to make up for that whole California shortfall, but that's just a guess.
Something like this will completely change the dynamics of war. The future of warfare is robotic infantry and special forces enfused with nanomachine armor. I think its a mostly great thing. It seems to me, that the closest thing to peace is a war without casualties. War is an inevitability and if modern technology can provide a way for soldiers to sit in a safe location and control their mechanical counterparts and defend our country I think that's great. But we do run the risk of turning warfare into nothing more than a giant video game. Politicians may be too quick to act without that barrier of the enormous casualties that modern warfare brings with it. What worries me even more is that I think it can be empirically proven that the younger the people the better they are at video games. Faster hand/eye coordination, etc. Is it such a large mental jump to think that special drafts might be instituted to get the best of these new soldiers from the ranks of under-18 year olds? Perhaps this thought doesn't hold up, but it seems like a logical progression to me.
I don't know what their future plans are but I've used it as a quick way to get news. It reminds me of old BBS's in that its basically text menu driven, and where else in the modern age can you find ascii art? I think its pretty cool that they've taken what is essentially a proprietary platform that is, well lets face it, being used as Microsoft Windows is to dominate the world and turned it into something that they control. I think the only reason its being targeted to kids is that its called "SmarterChild". I mean if these kids are going to want to get stock quotes, search the bible, or read reuters news then more power to them. People can't be so afraid of advertising, in fact if people were less afraid of advertising I could still get e-mail for free.
Honestly, at the risk of sounding cliche, real unix systems, that are bound to their hardware have fantastic uptime. The RS6000 we've had for a year has only been taken down for failover testing. If the resolution is hardware based then this Wintel duopoly isn't of much use. But the biggest question is, what will help desk people do if they can't tell people "Reboot the system." to take care of the problem. The vast majority of them may actually have to be trained in technical problem resolution. Millions will be thrown out of work (because it obviously exceeds their capabilities). Its the fragile nature of Windows that keeps the economy moving! Hopefully they will rethink this before its too late.
My opinion of Thomas Edison was forever altered when I read about one of his inventions, the electric chair It was an invention to show how dangerous AC current was by associating in the public's mind the horrible execution of people with Westinghouse's AC power, rather than the more benign DC that Edison was hawking. As for the spirit of invention in the old days, it was quite a marvel that he was able to do so many things, but thankfully in this internet revolution, with all its new inventions, there's no comparison to an electric chair. No modern death by spam, (although, slow death by cellphone may be an option) or the like. However, you must appreciate that he was one man that changed the world in a way that it would take the entire internet to do.
When you had that story about Parrot (Perl and Python merging) that was pretty cool, but this year's were rediculous. Nothing really stood out. An april's fool joke is supposed to actually try to fool you. The only one that remotely comes close is maybe the Wil Wheaton one because it could possibly be true. UPN has never exactly proven its judgement in such things. What's the deal with that too? Is he becoming the Open Source's answer to Danny Bonaduce? Will he be going on celebrity boxing any time soon? Wil Wheaton OS, etc, its all a bit much. Obviously they can't all be onion articles, but they could be mildly amusing. Perhaps you should have used the same critieria that keeps bad submissions off slashdot normally and applied it to the ones that you put up instead of just taking anyone and everyone's april fools day message.
I've recently had to install a remote access situation at work for a bunch of consultants working on a project. We have non-public IPs for our inhouse machines and a couple of webservers with public IP's and then I discovered the magic of SSH port forwarding. We were able to forward PCAnywhere as well as several other TCP ports (the one drawback of SSH is that you can't forward UDP ports) that allowed them to use client programs across the internet without compromising security. In fact its worked too well and almost everyone in the department has asked me to set up their system for PCAnywhere over SSH. Its a poor-man's VPN (which you would use to do it right). But with SSH you can forward VNC and X-Windows, and of course you have your SSH for your unix systems. Does it work well? Well that depends on your bandwidth. Lots of bandwidth makes everything more palatable.
This is a wonderful discovery, however, I thought we've suspected for some time that there's polar ice-caps though. And so those clouds that the rover saw sometime ago could in fact have been water clouds(I think they thought it was some other toxic substance)? So the fact that there's water and that we seem to be heading towards a future of profitable martian water companies. So what's missing is a greenhouse effect to make the temperature go up. I believe that this could solved by declaring Mars to be a smoking zone. The dwindling smoking areas on earth should produce the kind of tourism that would make martian exploration possible. Imagine the kind of funding that would be given by philip morris. We'd additionally eliminate the health threats of second hand smoking on earth by shipping them all out there and raise the temperature on mars by several degrees (Something on the order of Buffalo in February). It'll also make a nice dump site for our nuclear waste. Mars, the landfill of the solar system.
I cannot dispute that they have many many talented people working at IBM. I, however, do think that its a negative development that two monoliths are producing their own versions of Linux, if its more than just a branding they run the risk of forking. Besides, there were already working versions of Redhat and I think at least one other distro and now that revenue stream will be gone for those companies. No one will elect to use Redhat's OS/390 version of Linux over IBM's. Its kinda like how ma and pop organizations are effected when a Walmart comes to town. Don't forget IBM also makes many other architectures, and can stake a claim to having unique insight into everything from the AS/400 down to PowerPC systems, I do not see that as a valid excuse for attempting to crush every other vendor in these areas.
The same goes for Sun, if they make a sparc version of linux, what about the other guys who might be targetting their distros at the sparc architecture? Gone. Its not all bad news, it does mean that linux has come of age in the enterprise server world.
There's an article here on cnet news that explains the whole thing. They don't want you to go after the much more powerful and robust linux system that IBM has and go for their version of Linux for smaller systems. The alarming thing is that they are producing their OWN version of Linux, not using Redhat or another company. And also IBM I understand is doing this too. This can't be a good thing for linux at all. Proprietary versions of linux? Or perhaps some people think it'd be okay if its just branded, I just don't think its a good idea at all.
I think they want to utilize the benefits of linux however they do not want to allow Linux to creep into the larger servers where Sun dominates. And IBM which has AIX 5L (AIX w/linux compatibility) and now a special Linux for the mainframe it directly challenges their most valuable property, solaris which is valuable because all that software is made for it which makes people buy sun systems.
You find the program you need to run and then look at the systems running it, and unless you're already running AIX or HP-UX your first choice is probably Sun (and sun is usually always a choice). Now Linux comes in, becomes this pervasive server software and Solaris doesn't really look as hot as it did anymore.
More often than not with a database your bottleneck is I/O. When you run a database you cannot have enough disks, and you cannot have enough FAST disks. In order to accomplish the kind of I/O bandwidth that a place like google is going to need you're going to need the best EMC arrays (or perhaps an IBM Shark) money can buy. And guess what? They run you megabucks. You can't just take a bunch of SCSI disks and expect them to perform as well as Fibre channel arrays. You gotta have controllers with multiple caches. Everyone who's never dealt with databases think that SCSI is the beginning and the end of hard drives, and its so far from being the truth its not funny.
I've really no idea how complex the queries are or whether or not they use a relational database but that being said its still has to hit the disk to retrieve the data and that's where every decently designed database's bottleneck is. Besides google caches all its pages. Egads! Do you have any idea how much RAM they must need for just that alone? Yes RAM is faster. Oracle even teaches you to try to keep your frequently used tables in cache anyhow, because its fastest, of course they qualify that with the word small realizing that most people don't have the gobs of memory needed to cache large tables.
I think what happened to netscape was a terrible thing, and I'd hate to see the same fate befall Linux, and really the flagship line of linux is Redhat, so as Redhat goes so goes linux. I can only imagine that they've got planned some new cable-box with linux and web access, to trump Xbox's console. On the other hand this combination would most likely eventually provide a user-friendly system that sat on top of linux. The simple fact that AOL has millions of subscribers and Time Warner also has millions of subscribers could conceivably destroy the desktop OS monopoly held by microsoft in several small steps. However, I've long believed that this need by the linux user community to enter the desktop arena is a rediculous one that will do nothing but undermine the idea that Linux is a server strength OS, something that it has achieved after a long struggle. (There's enough people already prejudiced by its open source nature) I can only hope is that this merger will not happen because Linux will lose its credibility in the server arena.
First of all, everything's fairly logical and shouldn't shock anyone. The economy's contracting, negative growth, and that means companies are getting smaller, firing workers, or going out of business all together if their fundamental's weren't solid (remember a rising tide lifts all boats, but the tide isn't rising.) So they have fewer people, need fewer technical support people, and perhaps put those programming projects on hold. In general it would seem a recession hits techs hard. That being said, the free-fall in the stock market that started drying up all the venture capital began about 2 years ago this April. If memory serves just about all the domains are rented for two years, at least it was the way it was done two years ago. Since things haven't turned around, no one will be renewing them. Remember, a great deal of dotcom names are tied to company names. If they don't exist anymore they too will go away. And if the economy stagnates, or continues to go down there will not be new registries. Personal sites may fill in the gap, but how many web developers can their be in the world 10 million? How many of them don't already have their own personal pages? So it is not a rosey outlook at all. However even though the internet is doomed to be smaller in this sense, it doesn't mean that this has anything to do job prospects for techies (or mean that the internet will implode like a reverse big bang). Whatever has failed, will lose their registry. Also remember most of those "dotcoms" took out TONS of domain names (at least the one I worked at did) figuring the cash to roll it out would follow. My feeling is that we work in an elastic sector and when the companies go back to making server and software purchases they will have to hire people to utilize them, regardless of how many domains exist in the world.
I feel safer at night knowing that our technology is so advanced that we can even track Santa clause. But I'm worried about the cost to the economy because of all the money outlayed because of Santa. The amount of money we spent to irradiate the mail that was sent to him, and I presume he will be given an F15 fighter jet escort because of the hightened state of security. I think the cost of this far surpasses the cost of toys for every girl and boy. But there's an opportunity for santa to repay us. He knows when people are sleeping you know, and when they're awake, and obviously he knows where everyone is, so why doesn't the FBI find out from him where Bin Laden is? I mean think of all the free publicity cocoa-cola and other American companies give him over the years, the least he can do for the country is help our war effort. I personally would support covert military action at the north pole to find Santa Clause and find out what he knows, and while they're at it they should get some of that technology that he has. Especially that part in that poem,
"..And laying his finger aside of his nose, And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;"
That I think could be very useful in those caves of Tora Bora.
I haven't seen that many warnings since the last time I turned on CNBC. There's a great advertisement for MySQL. The Postgresql fans must be very happy. Apparently everyone needs an enterprise class database if they're getting slashdotted.
Xbox went for the same strategy as PS2, build up artificial demand by limiting the amount available after its release. They didn't want to be jerks about it like Sony, so they made it somewhat more available. Nintendo smartly identified that putting out as many units as possible would make a better statement, by comparison, after all with the Xbox's sold out and timmy at home wanting a game machine, they should get an upsurge in sales. Anyhow it won't help, anything built in the shape of a cube is doomed from the start.
It should be a great concern to everyone when governments try to curtail any sort of research, as science is neither innately evil, nor is it innately beneficial. It is only the way that the science is applied that it turns to be one or the other. The cloning of humans is filled with perils, but not allowing science to progress down a particular avenue is a much more serious problem. This is science with the potential to save millions of lives. How many people will we be dooming by not pursuing it? This is a stark contrast the development of nuclear weapons, which was science developed for the expressed use of killing millions. That presented a much graver problem to our society, and yet nuclear weapons could be argued to have stopped any other world wars from happening which is an incredibly positive situation.
The real problem here isn't that this science is harmful, god knows it is much less so than most other things under development or in production, but that it goes against the moral grain of those in power. The paradox is that while we can accept those inventions that kill life, those that create life are far more scarey to a great many more people. We should have more faith in ourselves, and our ability to regulate this industry to the extent that it will not become harmful to society. Its a great opportunity for science and it should not be precluded.
Boy oh boy. It's not bad enough that we go nukes to destroy the earth now we're going to have man-made asteroids. Good thing its re-usable those one way ICBMs are so expensive. Now how long before Dr. Evil puts his laser on the moon? Well, Superpowers have to stay ahead of the technology curve or risk falling behind to upstarts. While I appreciate anything that gets that kind of technology developed, obviously the application is not good. Certainly it's the military that has always lead the way in technological advances in exploration technology (the submarine and sonar for instance). This will possibly go down as one more example our contradictory society. Personally, I find the idea of boulders dropping from space a helluva lot more scary than boring old nukes.
So have a bannana and prepare yourself for our future ape overlords.
There's certainly no shortage of programmer now. Yes a lot of H1-B visa people are being hired. No one has the motivation that they do. Take the Indian H1-B workers (please). In their high school they're taught every "money making" in demand program out there. American companies open up corporations in India which the only responsibility is to recruit. They come over here, making 40k a year. The average salary over there is a fraction of that. Additionally they're the hope of their town or village. Since they're the creme of the crop, they have a chip on their shoulders. In my experience their impression of American programmers aren't very high. They're a tight nit group and always network. Meanwhile, the company owns their visa, so they don't run to another job for a few dollars more, which is a rampant attribute of american programmers. So by default they're much more difficult to recruit and retain.
But then again this is how it used to be.
Right now there's so many out of work american programmers that any stable company should have their pick of all-stars. Unfortunately the layoffs and the hiring freeze has had a huge impact on H1B Visas... Most of them are being forced to go home and of course its a great shame to them. Most of the computer jobs that exist there were either at american companies, or companies that got their money from american companies that hired them for jobs. Its tougher for them than it is for us. Additionally those all-star all-americans are having enough trouble finding work, but they'll be picked before the H1-B visas. I don't think we can blame the countries that send them, and mostly its the individual that's trying for a better life, and only a small amount of blame exists on the opportunist companies, the real blame is that the stigma surrounding being a "nerd" has, for so many years preceding the boom, made the numbers of technical people drop by so much that they couldn't ramp up to produce the workers. But boom times are over and equillibrium is beginning to take place.
As convenient as it must be for die hard C programmers to write shell scripts in a C like language, honestly it would seem to me that they could pick up perl in a day and any shell scripting language in a couple of hours. In fact I would be shocked if they haven't already. And as much as I appreciate the freedom of innovation that people think they have creating new programming languages, just because they found another way to spell FOR doesn't mean they have the right to give birth to language. The people who are coming up with these web languages and scripting languages that pop up on freshmeat probably dream of the day when their language has their own O'Reilly animal/vegatible/other book. But do they really make the computing world a better place? Sure some languages with good ideas can start from no where and build momentum, like PHP for example. But it was innovative for its time, with its preprocessor inside of apache. And then it kept on innovating. Rebol is another example, probably the easiest language to get accustomed to, ever. You can change the language to your own syntax. That's some kind of an advance. That's what really needs to be the test for a new language. If you're not doing something new then what's the point? Personally I'm waiting for ASM-shell, why use perl to do assembler's work. Perhaps I'll try to write it myself. Then maybe someday I can get the chupacabra on my language's O'Reilly Book.
If a rumor was posted on that site's main page its all but released for public knowledge. Its very difficult times. The crash is starting to close down some of the best known websites, like we saw last week with Suck.com. The problem with open source is that there's no money in it. I believe one of the much touted ways companies were going to make money off of open source was to provide support and consulting for the software. These companies never really sprung up. What ended up happening was that it opened access to these extremely advanced systems to the public which learned them, and then went off to work at websites. Consulting co's could have formed a nucleus of an open source market. Instead we got caffienated beverages sponsoring the websites.
VALinux being a hardware supplier will of course suffer sales slowdowns with the rest of the market. Those kinds of servers, like VALinux and Penguin Computing make are for websites and NOCs, and so many IT budgets are frozen. So what happens when bastions of freedom suddenly need money? Will slashdot sell out? And by that I mean will we start seeing animercials ala zdnet? Possibly a licensing fee for slash code? Perhaps slashdot can sell moderation points on ebay? Will we need to accompany our link submissions with a 20 dollar processing fee? I'm of course kidding, I'm sure Slashdot's much too respectable for that, but it must be one of the highest trafficked sites that VALinux owns, and possibly on the internet period. Unfortunately it looks that the only company making money off the internet is AOL.