Having run RAID quite a bit myself one must remember having all your drives in one box is always an invitation for trouble since hardware failures on a higher order will likely hit all the drives.
Not to mention the temptation to use _Identical_ disks in your redundant array... I've had a RAID1 pair fail totally when both drives died within 24 hours of each other because of a firmware bug. This happens a lot more than most people think. Statistical analysis of the reliability of RAID _always_ assumes failures arrive independently of each other, but a large proportion of failures are caused not by random events but by external circumstances and therefore happen either simultaneously or nearly simultaneously.
Nope, he is asking whether he should trust a software RAID for data protection......and no, he should not. RAID (both software and hardwar, all RAID levels except 0) are about minimizing downtime and not about protecting data.
Err.. he actually says "should a drive crash, I want the system up and running in no time", i.e. his goal is minimizing downtime. I don't know where you got the idea that this was a replacement for a backup strategy.
There are a number of solutions, not just Windows 7 or a hardware RAID controller.
To begin with, every NT-lineage Windows version ever produced supports software RAID out of the box. Add that to the fact that any major Linux distro today supports software RAID. And so do the *BSDs. And Mac OS X. And Solaris. And probably a bunch of other platforms I can't think of right now.
Perhaps he has already decided to run Windows 7 for other reasons... having done so, none of these options are avaiable to him. Except the NT-lineage Windows software RAID, which is what he's asking about.
Hell, you could buy one of these one of these and throw the drives in it, connect it to your network switch, and presto -- instant RAID+NAS.
My experience is that NAS is a _lot_ slower than local storage for many applications. If he's a developer, for instance, he really wants local storage, otherwise he's going to be suffering substantially slower compile times. Video encoding and DVD authoring likewise is noticeably slowed by access over 100Mbit networks. And he may not want to update to 1Gbit just so he can use a fancy NAS box.
I think we would all like to know why you think Windows 7 is your only option, because if that's what you think, you don't know how mistaken you are.
His options, basically are:
* A hardware RAID controller. Either use the one on his motherboard, or shell out cash for a better one. Summary makes it sound like he's decided he doesn't want to spend any more cash, and I can't say I blame him. It isn't worth it. * Software RAID as provided by whatever OS he decides to use. Generally it isn't worth switching OS just to get a better software RAID implementation, at least not for a desktop machine, so for him this comes down to Windows 7. * NAS; this is an expensive solution that provides suboptimal performance. If he has only a single desktop machine there are no real advantages to the approach, either. * SAN; this is an even more expensive solution, although admittedly it would provide the best performance. Not really a realistic option for a home desktop system, though.
So I don't really see any viable options for him other than the two he asked about.
I think you're incorrect about Heinlein. If you look at his books, the closest I think he comes is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966
While I haven't read it, I've seen recent reviews of Friday that comment on how accurately it foretells the Internet as we have it today. It's not a central part of the book, but just part of the background of the world that it's set in. I've also seen suggestions that For Us, The Living (which I also haven't read), while off in some admittedly important details (like the basic way the technology works) has a worldwide information network with a similar function to the modern Internet. Here's an interesting discussion on the subject.
And we still haven't cyberrecovered from all the cybershit that people keep cyberinventing.
I mean seriously, the term was a stupid one when he invented one, stupid people adopted the prefix without even considering what it meant, and suddenly everything's cyber-something. And none of them cared that "cyber" refers to electronic control of real systems, not virtual interfaces.
Yeah, to be honest, a lot of this article is basically bullshit.
What Gibson introduced was the idea of a global network of millions of computers, which he described in astonishing detail--though the World Wide Web, as we know it today, was still more than a decade away
Such global networks featured in the fiction of Heinlein, Asimov and plenty of others before Neuromancer was published. Plenty of authors predicted the growth and utility of world wide computer networks, although none (including Gibson) grasped the full implications of this. And basically, everyone here was copying the ideas of Vannevar Bush, anyway.
But Gibson took the World Wide Web much further. By introducing the concept of cyberspace, he made the Web a habitable place, with all the world's data stores represented as visual, even palpable, structures arranged in an endless matrix.
Gibson didn't "introduce the concept of cyberspace". He may have invented the name that eventually became associated with it, but the idea of a visual 3D interface to computer networks was old by the time Neuromancer was published. Hell, the film Tron was highly popular 6 years beforehand, and basically involved almost exactly the same concepts: a three dimensional world in which a person can interact on a physical level with the virtual components of a software system. Sure, the way the world is presented is different, but the idea is basically the same. And Bruce Sterling was writing stuff _extremely_ similar to Gibson's work a few years ahead of him.
This article is basically placing Neuromancer in a historical context that it does not warrant: it did not innovate these ideas.
I dont really ever remember seeing and advertisement in ANY BOOK I have ever purchased.
Most of the books I've purchased recently have anywhere from 3-10 pages of ads at the back. One of them had a really annoying ad on a thick sheet of card inserted in the middle of the book (Making Money, Terry Pratchett, Corgi Books paperback edition; the ad was for Pratchett's next book and gave details of how to preorder it via Tesco's web site... I don't know whether or not only copies sold by Tesco had this insertion).
CCP already has something like that in place in EVE Online.
You can buy a GTC (Game Time Code) and directly sell it to other players for ISK (ingame money)
Yes, but there's no official mechanism for converting your ISK back to real money. For that, you'd basically have to sell it externally, presumably to an ISK trader.
Actually, this isn't true either. See this article for pointers to some of the failings of SQL in dealing with financial data, particularly time series (e.g. sales figures, share prices, etc.). Here's another take on the problem, which essentially is that SQL doesn't recognise that there can be relationships between the rows of a table (e.g., "this happened after this").
As mentioned in the tags, this is a horrible summary. I don't get the feeling I know what Lori was charged with. Is it piracy? Is it shoplifting? Speeding? Drug charges?
Who knows? Not me.
The story includes links to all three of the previous slashdot articles that discussed her case, in the "related stories" section. Isn't this enough?
Now there are a lot of VNC technologies out there - why haven't any of them gotten this right before? How come this guy can magically do what those vendors couldn't?
I'm sincerely asking. I would think it'd be damn hard to send high quality video streams of your desktop at some constraint network capacity.
Theres three explanations: this is snake oil, this company has developed a really awesome new compression scheme, or at least something was missing from that video.
None of the above. I imagine he's using custom hardware to get the video encoding done with minimum latency. Streaming an MPEG4 or similar of your desktop wouldn't take an awful lot of network throughput, but there's no way you can do it without a significant slowdown using standard hardware... but hack your graphics system (either card or driver) to work with a hardware video encoder and suddenly an awful lot of stuff becomes possible.
What worries me is the 3D as it would be done in software but then again.
It's fairly easy to get a 3D card to render to an off-screen buffer and then grab that buffer for encoding. My suspicion is he has the graphics card piping data to a custom hardware video encoder (probably based on an off-the-shelf FPGA PCIe card, which are available for about $3-400 each) in order to reduce latency. Realtime video compression is hard, and he'll have to be doing everything he can to minimize latency.
Or you can just pay $60 per computer per month with a 24-month minimum commitment for mobile broadband, like a lot of proponents of cloud computing on Slashdot have been recommending.
I know you're being sarcastic, but:
* Where I am, mobile broadband costs about £10-£15 a month ($16-23) and is available on a pay-as-you-go basis, so you don't have to pay for any month you don't use it. Hardware to hook it up will cost you about £50 ($80). I'd be really surprised if it is actually 3-4 times more expensive on a long term contract for you. * OTOH, it would be useless in this situation. Bandwidth is extremely poor (they advertise 7.2Mb/s, but I've never managed to get more than about 1.5), and reliability is worse (connections randomly drop even in areas with good reception; the system-provided DNS servers are heavily overloaded and aren't even located in the same country as me; sometimes the service just doesn't work for no reason and you have to disconnect and reconnect). This may just be the network I was using (3), but there isn't exactly a lot of competition.
What exactly is the point of having games run in The Cloud, other than the wish to remain buzzword compliant?
Gamers spend serious cash on hardware. AIUI, a typical gamer will put down an average of $500-1000 per annum on hardware, just so that they can continue running the latest and greatest games. That hardware sits unused most of the time.
The idea of cloud gaming is to put some fraction of that money into shared hardware instead. You'll spend maybe $180 per annum renting access to the hardware, but you'll _always_ have latest generation, best possible kit available when you need it. And if you're playing a game that doesn't need it, you'll be quietly downgraded so that somebody else can get a chance at the high end stuff.
But I strongly suspect that the kids who have gone off the deep end have been more effective killers because they have trained extensively on killing simulators (ie., violent video games).
I read an article not long ago that thoroughly debunked this idea. I can't find it now, but it focussed on one or two key issues with your reasoning, which essentially added up to "really shooting people is not even approximately the same as doing it in a game".
IIRC, the main points were:
* Using a mouse to aim a simulated weapon and aiming a real weapon are utterly different skills, requiring totally different sets of muscles and entirely different mindset. The game is about being reasonably precise in a very quick movement; in reality you need to be very precise in a steady movement, and to have control over your breathing and balance. The skills are utterly unalike. * Most FPS games encourage the player to shoot quickly, readjust and shoot again if they missed. This would be an utterly inappropriate tactic in a school-shooting type scenario, as you would waste most of your ammunition. * Most FPS games encourage the player to shoot for their opponents' heads. This would be an utterly inappropriate tactic in a school-shooting type scenario, as it would greatly increase the number of shots you miss, thus wasting your time and ammunition. * Most FPS games involve opponents who must be shot multiple times before they will drop. This is unrealistic and means that most tactics learned in such games are inappropriate for real life scenarios where the first shot will usually incapacitate (if not actually kill) your opponent.
Just generate one-time use, random URL links in each page view. Now nothing can be linked to except for the home page.
And you've broken your visitors back button, reload button, bookmarks and session management tools.
Anyway, this isn't about _preventing_ links. Nobody in their right mind wants that. This is about _controlling_ how links are used. This is about preventing people running sites that scrape an automated summary from each article and link to it (*cough* google news *cough*). This is about controlling how the links are presented to prevent criticism. This is about charging for the right to link.
Banning links to copyrighted material is plainly asinine. If I link to a news item from a news source [...] I have helped generate traffic, and therefore revenue, for the news source.
I don't think his idea is as simple as "ban links". I imagine what he'd want is some kind of "linking right" whereby sites could dictate their own terms for how links are used. This would enable a site to have a public licence that says stuff like "link to at most 5 of our stories per day" and "don't put anything in the affiliate field unless you are a registered affiliate" and stuff like that. Sure, some crazy site owners would use it for a blanket ban, but don't think he doesn't understand the economics of the situation: this would probably be a big plus for the commercial news sites. They could still get their free advertising, but they would be able to control how it's used more. That's exactly what they've always wanted.
Leaving aside the question of whether a nude by itself would constitute porn at all...
Yes. There are two ways of answering the question:
* Morally. From a moral perspective, her actual age is irrelevant, but rather her capacity to understand what she's doing and consent to it. She clearly has no such capacity. * Legally. From a legal perspective, the usual formulation of child porn is something like "depictions which are or appear to be of a minor".
> Well, I'm glad they found such an unbiased and informed person to make such a statement about security versus usability
He's not a security expert, but he IS a useability expert
In order to make this kind of statement with any authority, he'd need to be both.
[Over-the-shoulder-attacks] will work even WITH masked passwords [...]. In the case of ATMs, masking it "security theater".
It is perfectly possible to protect against somebody attempting to watch the keypad. One merely needs to place another hand over the one that is typing. To also block out the screen would not be so easy.
Nielson is recognized as one of the leading experts in his field.
By whom? I know professional HCI researchers who basically consider him an outspoken ass. He has a reputation in the field of going too far with almost everything he says, rejecting every compromise in favour of the extreme. That he gets most press attention does not make him a leading expert of the field.
Of course it does. Citing from encyclopedias, whether Wikipedia or any other, is not an acceptable practice in any sort of research I've ever heard of.
Yes, but writing a non-fiction book for the general market is not research.
Slashdot Mirror
Having run RAID quite a bit myself one must remember having all your drives in one box is always an invitation for trouble since hardware failures on a higher order will likely hit all the drives.
Not to mention the temptation to use _Identical_ disks in your redundant array... I've had a RAID1 pair fail totally when both drives died within 24 hours of each other because of a firmware bug. This happens a lot more than most people think. Statistical analysis of the reliability of RAID _always_ assumes failures arrive independently of each other, but a large proportion of failures are caused not by random events but by external circumstances and therefore happen either simultaneously or nearly simultaneously.
Nope, he is asking whether he should trust a software RAID for data protection... ...and no, he should not. RAID (both software and hardwar, all RAID levels except 0) are about minimizing downtime and not about protecting data.
Err.. he actually says "should a drive crash, I want the system up and running in no time", i.e. his goal is minimizing downtime. I don't know where you got the idea that this was a replacement for a backup strategy.
There are a number of solutions, not just Windows 7 or a hardware RAID controller.
To begin with, every NT-lineage Windows version ever produced supports software RAID out of the box. Add that to the fact that any major Linux distro today supports software RAID. And so do the *BSDs. And Mac OS X. And Solaris. And probably a bunch of other platforms I can't think of right now.
Perhaps he has already decided to run Windows 7 for other reasons... having done so, none of these options are avaiable to him. Except the NT-lineage Windows software RAID, which is what he's asking about.
Hell, you could buy one of these one of these and throw the drives in it, connect it to your network switch, and presto -- instant RAID+NAS.
My experience is that NAS is a _lot_ slower than local storage for many applications. If he's a developer, for instance, he really wants local storage, otherwise he's going to be suffering substantially slower compile times. Video encoding and DVD authoring likewise is noticeably slowed by access over 100Mbit networks. And he may not want to update to 1Gbit just so he can use a fancy NAS box.
I think we would all like to know why you think Windows 7 is your only option, because if that's what you think, you don't know how mistaken you are.
His options, basically are:
* A hardware RAID controller. Either use the one on his motherboard, or shell out cash for a better one. Summary makes it sound like he's decided he doesn't want to spend any more cash, and I can't say I blame him. It isn't worth it.
* Software RAID as provided by whatever OS he decides to use. Generally it isn't worth switching OS just to get a better software RAID implementation, at least not for a desktop machine, so for him this comes down to Windows 7.
* NAS; this is an expensive solution that provides suboptimal performance. If he has only a single desktop machine there are no real advantages to the approach, either.
* SAN; this is an even more expensive solution, although admittedly it would provide the best performance. Not really a realistic option for a home desktop system, though.
So I don't really see any viable options for him other than the two he asked about.
I think you're incorrect about Heinlein. If you look at his books, the closest I think he comes is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966
While I haven't read it, I've seen recent reviews of Friday that comment on how accurately it foretells the Internet as we have it today. It's not a central part of the book, but just part of the background of the world that it's set in. I've also seen suggestions that For Us, The Living (which I also haven't read), while off in some admittedly important details (like the basic way the technology works) has a worldwide information network with a similar function to the modern Internet. Here's an interesting discussion on the subject.
This is the man who coined the term "cyberspace"
And we still haven't cyberrecovered from all the cybershit that people keep cyberinventing.
I mean seriously, the term was a stupid one when he invented one, stupid people adopted the prefix without even considering what it meant, and suddenly everything's cyber-something. And none of them cared that "cyber" refers to electronic control of real systems, not virtual interfaces.
Replying to myself to correct an arithmetic error:
Hell, the film Tron was highly popular 6 years beforehand
I meant, of course, 3 years beforehand.
Yeah, to be honest, a lot of this article is basically bullshit.
Such global networks featured in the fiction of Heinlein, Asimov and plenty of others before Neuromancer was published. Plenty of authors predicted the growth and utility of world wide computer networks, although none (including Gibson) grasped the full implications of this. And basically, everyone here was copying the ideas of Vannevar Bush, anyway.
Gibson didn't "introduce the concept of cyberspace". He may have invented the name that eventually became associated with it, but the idea of a visual 3D interface to computer networks was old by the time Neuromancer was published. Hell, the film Tron was highly popular 6 years beforehand, and basically involved almost exactly the same concepts: a three dimensional world in which a person can interact on a physical level with the virtual components of a software system. Sure, the way the world is presented is different, but the idea is basically the same. And Bruce Sterling was writing stuff _extremely_ similar to Gibson's work a few years ahead of him.
This article is basically placing Neuromancer in a historical context that it does not warrant: it did not innovate these ideas.
I dont really ever remember seeing and advertisement in ANY BOOK I have ever purchased.
Most of the books I've purchased recently have anywhere from 3-10 pages of ads at the back. One of them had a really annoying ad on a thick sheet of card inserted in the middle of the book (Making Money, Terry Pratchett, Corgi Books paperback edition; the ad was for Pratchett's next book and gave details of how to preorder it via Tesco's web site... I don't know whether or not only copies sold by Tesco had this insertion).
CCP already has something like that in place in EVE Online.
You can buy a GTC (Game Time Code) and directly sell it to other players for ISK (ingame money)
Yes, but there's no official mechanism for converting your ISK back to real money. For that, you'd basically have to sell it externally, presumably to an ISK trader.
SQL is great for financial data.
Actually, this isn't true either. See this article for pointers to some of the failings of SQL in dealing with financial data, particularly time series (e.g. sales figures, share prices, etc.). Here's another take on the problem, which essentially is that SQL doesn't recognise that there can be relationships between the rows of a table (e.g., "this happened after this").
As mentioned in the tags, this is a horrible summary. I don't get the feeling I know what Lori was charged with. Is it piracy? Is it shoplifting? Speeding? Drug charges?
Who knows? Not me.
The story includes links to all three of the previous slashdot articles that discussed her case, in the "related stories" section. Isn't this enough?
Now there are a lot of VNC technologies out there - why haven't any of them gotten this right before? How come this guy can magically do what those vendors couldn't?
I'm sincerely asking. I would think it'd be damn hard to send high quality video streams of your desktop at some constraint network capacity.
Theres three explanations: this is snake oil, this company has developed a really awesome new compression scheme, or at least something was missing from that video.
None of the above. I imagine he's using custom hardware to get the video encoding done with minimum latency. Streaming an MPEG4 or similar of your desktop wouldn't take an awful lot of network throughput, but there's no way you can do it without a significant slowdown using standard hardware... but hack your graphics system (either card or driver) to work with a hardware video encoder and suddenly an awful lot of stuff becomes possible.
What worries me is the 3D as it would be done in software but then again.
It's fairly easy to get a 3D card to render to an off-screen buffer and then grab that buffer for encoding. My suspicion is he has the graphics card piping data to a custom hardware video encoder (probably based on an off-the-shelf FPGA PCIe card, which are available for about $3-400 each) in order to reduce latency. Realtime video compression is hard, and he'll have to be doing everything he can to minimize latency.
It *enables* Try Before You Buy. Developers will take advantage of that. Eve Online would probably *love* to expose that.
Erm... EVE Online has a free trial already. OK, so you have to download a 2GB game client...
Or you can just pay $60 per computer per month with a 24-month minimum commitment for mobile broadband, like a lot of proponents of cloud computing on Slashdot have been recommending.
I know you're being sarcastic, but:
* Where I am, mobile broadband costs about £10-£15 a month ($16-23) and is available on a pay-as-you-go basis, so you don't have to pay for any month you don't use it. Hardware to hook it up will cost you about £50 ($80). I'd be really surprised if it is actually 3-4 times more expensive on a long term contract for you.
* OTOH, it would be useless in this situation. Bandwidth is extremely poor (they advertise 7.2Mb/s, but I've never managed to get more than about 1.5), and reliability is worse (connections randomly drop even in areas with good reception; the system-provided DNS servers are heavily overloaded and aren't even located in the same country as me; sometimes the service just doesn't work for no reason and you have to disconnect and reconnect). This may just be the network I was using (3), but there isn't exactly a lot of competition.
What exactly is the point of having games run in The Cloud, other than the wish to remain buzzword compliant?
Gamers spend serious cash on hardware. AIUI, a typical gamer will put down an average of $500-1000 per annum on hardware, just so that they can continue running the latest and greatest games. That hardware sits unused most of the time.
The idea of cloud gaming is to put some fraction of that money into shared hardware instead. You'll spend maybe $180 per annum renting access to the hardware, but you'll _always_ have latest generation, best possible kit available when you need it. And if you're playing a game that doesn't need it, you'll be quietly downgraded so that somebody else can get a chance at the high end stuff.
But I strongly suspect that the kids who have gone off the deep end have been more effective killers because they have trained extensively on killing simulators (ie., violent video games).
I read an article not long ago that thoroughly debunked this idea. I can't find it now, but it focussed on one or two key issues with your reasoning, which essentially added up to "really shooting people is not even approximately the same as doing it in a game".
IIRC, the main points were:
* Using a mouse to aim a simulated weapon and aiming a real weapon are utterly different skills, requiring totally different sets of muscles and entirely different mindset. The game is about being reasonably precise in a very quick movement; in reality you need to be very precise in a steady movement, and to have control over your breathing and balance. The skills are utterly unalike.
* Most FPS games encourage the player to shoot quickly, readjust and shoot again if they missed. This would be an utterly inappropriate tactic in a school-shooting type scenario, as you would waste most of your ammunition.
* Most FPS games encourage the player to shoot for their opponents' heads. This would be an utterly inappropriate tactic in a school-shooting type scenario, as it would greatly increase the number of shots you miss, thus wasting your time and ammunition.
* Most FPS games involve opponents who must be shot multiple times before they will drop. This is unrealistic and means that most tactics learned in such games are inappropriate for real life scenarios where the first shot will usually incapacitate (if not actually kill) your opponent.
Sun does a couple other dumb things though, like make backspace 5 times harder to hit.
That's OK, the last time I used a sun workstation, pressing backspace just made ^H appear anyway.
Just generate one-time use, random URL links in each page view. Now nothing can be linked to except for the home page.
And you've broken your visitors back button, reload button, bookmarks and session management tools.
Anyway, this isn't about _preventing_ links. Nobody in their right mind wants that. This is about _controlling_ how links are used. This is about preventing people running sites that scrape an automated summary from each article and link to it (*cough* google news *cough*). This is about controlling how the links are presented to prevent criticism. This is about charging for the right to link.
Banning links to copyrighted material is plainly asinine. If I link to a news item from a news source [...] I have helped generate traffic, and therefore revenue, for the news source.
I don't think his idea is as simple as "ban links". I imagine what he'd want is some kind of "linking right" whereby sites could dictate their own terms for how links are used. This would enable a site to have a public licence that says stuff like "link to at most 5 of our stories per day" and "don't put anything in the affiliate field unless you are a registered affiliate" and stuff like that. Sure, some crazy site owners would use it for a blanket ban, but don't think he doesn't understand the economics of the situation: this would probably be a big plus for the commercial news sites. They could still get their free advertising, but they would be able to control how it's used more. That's exactly what they've always wanted.
less
determiner & pronoun 1 a smaller amount of; not as much. 2 fewer in number
(source: Compact Oxford English Dictionary)
Sounds like meaning 2 is correct in this situation. Yes, fewer is better, but I don't think less is actually incorrect.
like, "It's time to start randomly killing Jews" (yes, that really is a quote) anti-semitic
Presumably killing them systematically leads to a holocaust that's too predictable and doesn't require any thought in the early stages?
[This is probably very obscure, so for anyone who doesn't get it... here)
Leaving aside the question of whether a nude by itself would constitute porn at all...
Yes. There are two ways of answering the question:
* Morally. From a moral perspective, her actual age is irrelevant, but rather her capacity to understand what she's doing and consent to it. She clearly has no such capacity.
* Legally. From a legal perspective, the usual formulation of child porn is something like "depictions which are or appear to be of a minor".
> Well, I'm glad they found such an unbiased and informed person to make such a statement about security versus usability
He's not a security expert, but he IS a useability expert
In order to make this kind of statement with any authority, he'd need to be both.
[Over-the-shoulder-attacks] will work even WITH masked passwords [...]. In the case of ATMs, masking it "security theater".
It is perfectly possible to protect against somebody attempting to watch the keypad. One merely needs to place another hand over the one that is typing. To also block out the screen would not be so easy.
Nielson is recognized as one of the leading experts in his field.
By whom? I know professional HCI researchers who basically consider him an outspoken ass. He has a reputation in the field of going too far with almost everything he says, rejecting every compromise in favour of the extreme. That he gets most press attention does not make him a leading expert of the field.
Of course it does. Citing from encyclopedias, whether Wikipedia or any other, is not an acceptable practice in any sort of research I've ever heard of.
Yes, but writing a non-fiction book for the general market is not research.