That's not technically correct. There were 2 ways of running old mac os apps. Apple released libraries and api's (I believe it was referred to as Cocoa at the time but its been a long time). Apps built using them could run unmodified on Os X and older OS's. The interesting part was this was released a before OS X was released, so many apps were already built with it by the time OS X was released. These apps were not technically native OS X apps, and took a performance hit compared to native OS X apps, but it was very easy to modify existing apps to use it. I remember Photoshop taking a lot of heat for taking a very long time to create an OS X native version. There was however the ability to boot the old OS under OS X, and run older apps. There was a heavy performance hit for this, especially if you only needed 1 app. I think Apple phased it out fairly quickly as it soon became unnecessary.
Don't forget you can carry around a bunch of games with 1 memory stick, plus media and music, emulators, etc. The real value in the psp was it could do a lot more then just games. Sony's retarded restrictions to try to promote their formats, media and agenda make a non-hacked psp look like a worthless pile of crap next to a hacked one, even if you never intend to pirate a game. If they wanted to make the psp a runaway success, they should have allowed homebrew from the start, and sold games online to be downloaded to a (dirt-cheap) standard sd card. Instead they tried to push the abortion that is umd (tiny optical disks in a portable player? really?) and the memory stick format. Nevermind you can buy an sd card with 4x the capacity for the same price, from a reputable company (thus avoiding the dirt-slow counterfeit problem Memory Sticks have) Sony has to push their dead on arrival proprietary format. The iPhone store pretty much proves if you combine bored users with wifi access and a store offering inexpensive games and apps they can have right away, its pretty much a license to print money. It's hard to make an argument for why you should buy instead of pirate when even ignoring the monetary component, the piracy experience is better in every possible way.
I know purists will hate this, but another solution would be to create a standardized way to display tibetan without the letter combination. Just like japanese has a more or less standardized process for displaying japanese words in the roman alphabet, a way to do something simliar in Tibetan would be useful. Spending a ton of time modifying all western software to use advanced typography to display Tibetan "correctly" could well backfire. The end result would be the effort required would result in few programs being translated at all, and another language becoming the defacto standard for computer savvy Tibetans. That road leads to youth with minimal skills in their own cultural language.
USB is slow, and is CPU dependent. What you gain in offloading the ssl to an usb device you would lose a decent chunk of to USB overhead. USB is the redheaded step-child of the server world for a reason.
Because I have yet to see a single legitimate reason NOT to upgrade XP from SP2 to SP3? The real question is why bother supporting users who are too lazy/stubborn to help themselves. Besides, it's not like it will suddenly break Firefox on sp2. It just means if you have an issue, they can say "upgrade to sp3 and see if you have the same problem". If your company's apps are such piles of shit that installing what is basically a collection of the hotfixes and security patches that were available before (although in the cases of some hotfixes they were not released except by request) you have bigger problems then running the latest and greatest firefox version.
It's not the fact that heavy users pay more that bothers me so much, it's the details of it. 1. The connections at the isp are sold by speed, not total data transferred. SO it seems highly questionable when cable companies repeatedly bump everyone's speed, then at the same time introduce caps. Furthermore, they need the pipes to support peak load, but at non-peak times they have lots of excess capacity. Yet the caps don't take this into effect at all. It seems a much fairer way to do it would be to adjust for the % of your connections speed you are using as well as the time of day. A voluntary cap at peak times in exchange for extra bandwidth at low load time would save the isp money and provide most heavy users with all the bittorrent bandwidth they could use.
2. The reporting tools on your cap usage are generally either non-existent (if you are lucky enough to even have published caps) or extremely basic. Unless you have the equipment and technical know-how to set something up yourself, you are generally left with a very rough educated guess at how close the cap you are. And if you do monitor it yourself, and have a discrepancy with the ISP's monitors, there is no mechanism for contesting or debating it.
3. The overage fees are always ridiculously out of sync with the extra costs involved. Considering that presumably your basic subscription pays for all fixed costs, such as maintaining the physical connection and networking, billing, tech support, etc. the only difference between a user at the cap and a user at double the cap is the extra bandwidth used. Yet the fees are often so high at to be ridiculous. $1 per gigabyte? You mean to tell me after all the fixed costs have been paid for, it costs them $1 per gigabyte? If that were true, there is no way they could be making a profit off regular subscribers. It's obvious this is not a "pay your fair share" price. This is an extortion price. They know heavy users make them less profit (the downside of a fixed rate "unlimited" model) and they know the grandma's of the world want a flat rate price even if they never use more then 5% of their capacity. So the caps and ridiculous fees are a way to slant the table in their favor, chasing off heavy users while still maintaining the pretense of flat-rate prices. They know in many areas they are a defacto monopoly, so if they were to just tell people "No we won't sell our service to you" they would be in trouble. So they create pricing policies that have the same effect.
The real crime here was the utter incompetence of the purchasers of these machines. They cost ridiculous amounts of money, but run Windows with an Access database in the background. I'm not anti-Windows, even though I like open source software a lot, I still use Windows in my day to day, and have no problems with it. that said, I would have fired anyone who suggested using windows for a voting machine. The concept is so ridiculous from an engineering stand point it's beyond words. Electronic voting can be done, but it would require sound engineering on every step of the process. These machines seem to be slapped together by the laziest and sloppiest vb programmers I've ever seen. It's like on of those nightmare custom app solutions written by a pack of "programmers" who just took up programming because their "web design" company tanked. Combine that with a shitty hardware solution (Basically a generic PC with no checksumming or error correction at any level, with no paper trail or anti-tampering measures). It's clear whoever made the purchase requirements was a completely inept fool with no technical experience. Then again, anyone with technical experience probably realizes electronic voting machines are a solution in search of a problem in the first place.
I have to agree. It's hard to feel sorry for them when they consistently act like such asshats. Annoying the shit out of your customers was never a good business model. It's stupid.
Advertising has a place in society and business. After all, if you have a product that I want to buy, but I've never heard of it/don't know where to get it, it doesn't do either of us any good. How many of us have busted our ass on a project only to find out 6 months later there was a product out there that would have made it easy? I know many people that subscribe to trade magazines just for the ads. Tell me who you are, what your product is, and in concrete terms what it is good for.
Most ads on the web completely fail at those tasks. They try to trick you into clicking, or annoy you into listening. they pop up, pop under, bounce around, cover the content. They play music, they move, they display images not appropriate for work settings, etc. Even if it was a product I wanted, they make me want to avoid doing business with the company. They treat the customer with no respect for their intelligence.
Most website owners are just as guilty. They sign up to some obnoxious ad network, where they have no control over the ads on their site. I'm always amazed at the number of major web sites that have banner ads for sites that are essentially fraud. When you are a Fortune 500 company and your website is telling users "We have detected 57 spyware infections" and "click the monkey to win $20" with animated gifs, something is wrong.
A good example of ads done right is Penny-Arcade. They insist on playing all the games and products they advertise in advance. They approve all the ads (and in many cases actually create the ads themselves) in advance. They make sure the ad is a good fit for their audience, and is something the audience will actually be interested in. The end result is good for their site, and good for the advertisers. They make way more money then they would off a banner network, and the advertiser gets way more impressions that actually has a chance at converting to a sale.
It's the same thing with TV and radio advertising. You can make your ad clever, funny, or factual. Or you can make your ad annoying as hell and distort the sound to make it super loud. One type you will probably watch, or at least not actively avoid. They other has you scrambling for the remote. If the networks had any sense, they would tell the latter group to go take a hike, because all they are accomplishing is selling tivos.
Seriously, who cares about "social skills" on an online forum for geeks? It's not like his family are going to read it. There's nothing insensitive about it, because the only people who will be offended will be people who didn't even know the guy having mock outrage on his behalf. I'm sorry if I don't want to cater to their imaginary grief.
If Linus died, I would say that sucks, who is going to be the face of the Linux kernel now? I don't know him, a handful of people on here have probably interacted with him on a professional level, but I doubt there are any that would really be effected on a personal level. I'm sure there would be tons eager to proclaim "how dare you talk about the kernel at a time like this" etc. ad nasuem. Fuck that. They don't actually give a crap about the guy who died, in fact they are probably thinking the same question. They have just seized an opportunity to be the high and mighty self-appointed moral police, and to that I say Fuck you. I'd take a troll over you anyday.
I wouldn't, because his original solution probably cost a small fortune. Compare PC prices from 1994 to pc prices today. You can probably buy 3 computers today for what each computer cost in 94. The downside of that is they may not last as long. That said, he's damn lucky if all his pc's have kept going for 15 years. In fact, the only reason he hasn't upgraded before is probably because of luck.
That said, while hardware designed to last 15 years is probably extremely cost-prohibitive, you can design the system to make replacing hardware very easy. Who cares about hardware failures if you can drop in a spare in minutes?
Anyways, if you want a system to last a long time with little management, there are some easy steps to take.
1. Use mature technology. 2. Use passive cooling. 3. Provide automated recovery. There will be failures in any system, make it easy to recover from. 4. Document and schedule regular maintenance, with reminders. For example, once a year blow the dust out of the pc's. Clear old entries out of the database. Run a hard drive/memory diagnostics to spot failures before it becomes a major issue.
So do you make a copy of every document you are given, on the chance your access might be revoked? Consider this scenario:
I hire a new contractor. To do his job, he requires access to confidential company documents. I give him that access, along with an agreement that the information he can access is confidential, and should not be copied or shared. Now he CAN break that agreement at any time, and I probably would never find out. But it would be highly unprofessional to do so, and since our financial interests at least in theory align (good news for the company is generally good news for the employees, even if they don't see a direct benefit) he has no real reason to violate that policy.
Now lets say I have to fire him cause he keeps slapping the secretary on the butt. Now he's pissed off at me, and the company, and probably looking for a job with my competitors. Now he is much more likely to violate that policy, and I have fewer avenues of redress if he does. After all, before he risked losing a job he already had, as well as guaranteeing a bad reference from me. So if he didn't make a copy before, he is going to now.
It's true that if you give them access at one time, and can revoke it later, they have a window of opportunity to copy that information. But if that window closes, and they didn't seize the opportunity, that's one less person with your data.
It's true there is no way to stop someone from keeping your data once they have access to it. But it doesn't happen automatically, they have to take the steps to do it. If you hire someone that's out to steal your data from the start, you are screwed. But chances are that's not the case.
Somehow I'm sure there is work that needs to be done around campus, that student's can do, without computer labs. I'm not saying toss the labs, but there's no reason to assume closing the labs would mean firing all the student employees. Most of the staff I've seen in the computer lab spent 99% of their time working on their studies or reading a book or browsing the internet, and the other 1% putting paper/toner in the printer. A more useful use of those resources might be a central helpdesk, where they can provide basic computer help and training. I know my school could really have used some people who just went around training and informing staff on how to use all the technological tools available to them. Lots of professors wasted time reimplementing things the school had already done for them, if they just knew where to look. For example, there was a system that automatically created a website and discussion board for each class, that allowed students to contact each other, the professor to post extra information, etc. Few of the staff outside the IT department ever used it, or knew it existed, but would instead try to set something up on their personal page or on a free service like yahoo groups or something. The point being, if you suddenly have 200+ computer savvy workers available, you can easily find productive things for them to do.
I know at least at my school, they had a number of computer labs. The largest were big, general purpose labs, with little more then a web browser and e-mail. These were always deserted. I found myself spending a lot of time in them for a period of about a week when my power supply died under warranty and I was waiting on the RMA. I never saw them used more then 25%. Of course part of that is probably because they were locked down heavily and ran pretty slowly. They also had smaller, special purpose computer labs in the various departments, that were always packed. Even though they were less conveniently located, they had better computers and the various specialized software used in courses. Furthermore, they also often felt more comfortable, because you would be surrounded by peers in your department, and didn't have that "empty library" atmosphere where people talk in hushed whispers.
The other computers that were ALWAYS in use was the first floor of the library. The library had a coffee shop, and lots of computers and tables that made it easy for group collaboration.
It seems to me that if you are a college administrator, you should probably spend a day in any computer lab you are investing resources in. See if it's being used, see what it's used for, and talk to the student's about why they chose that particular lab. Some are probably underused, some are probably in high demand. The prevalence of personal computers probably means the days of students packing the room just to use a word processor are probably over. That doesn't mean labs over all are done for.
So how come in every newspaper I read about a subject I have personal, first hand knowledge about, they get it completely wrong? I have had the experience of being completely misquoted in a newspaper article, where something I said was completely changed (and I knew I was speaking to a reporter, and I had approx. 8 witnesses who all agreed I was misquoted) and a complaint to the editor didn't even get a retraction. Whenever I see a news article in my local paper about technology or science, it is completely and totally wrong. Remember all those old articles about the "internet super-highway"? Or how about whenever the papers bring up violent video games (apparently every game ever is named Doom or Grand Theft Auto). Now if the only reason I see this blatant misinformation is because I have first-hand knowledge of the thing they are talking about, why should I believe they are getting everything else right? Frankly most bloggers seem down right competent next to them, and I hate the word blog with a passion.
Really, our failure as a nation has been to pretend their viewpoint has merit (everyone is a beatiful snowflake after all) instead of calling those people stupid, and ignoring everything they say.
I read it, and that's what made me conclude it was a waste of time. If you are an amateur, what good does listening to another amateur read off lines from Apple's PR sheet do you? That's what he did. All the reasons are pretty much prefaced with "Apple said". If you asked Dell why their hard drives have a markup they'd tell you the same line of BS. Last I saw the tagline for the site was "News for Nerds" not "Regurgitate PR crap without question". Now if he had replaced some Xserve drives with aftermarket drives, and tested them against the official Apple ones, that would be both relevant and interesting. Hell if he had bought one, taken it apart, and posted an analysis of what goes in to making one (from the brand of HD used, the quality of the carrier, etc. That would be interesting. To send Apple an e-mail asking them "Hey why should I pay you extra money to buy your official hard drives over the Newegg daily deal" and copy and paste their response is a waste of everyone's time. I read the article because the story title "Going Deep Inside Xserve Apple Drive Modules" led me to believe that there might actually be something unique about them, and the article would actually look at what's inside.
This retarded fluff piece aside, the reason people buy (and pay a premium) for oem "blessed" hard drive replacements is because they JUST FUCKING WORK. If I save $100 on a hard drive, but spend two hours dicking with the raid controller to get it to play nice, or find out that it is in fact 2 mb smaller then the other drives, and now the raid won't rebuild, or has some firmware issue that I now need to rig up something to update, etc. I've lost money.
There is value in having everything already tested, and all your equipment in a "supported" configuration. When you have problems it makes it that much easier.
The fact that this article was apparently written by someone who does not know the difference between SAS and SATA makes it completely worthless. Clearly they are not qualified to admin the server they do have, much less write articles about the technical benefits of apple drives over other replacements.
Lower memory usage, in exchange for a worse ui (unless you like low res icons), no security features (say goodbye to NX bit and other hardening features) and generally at this point worse in every way. Now when XP first came out, it was reasonable to keep using 2k for quite awhile, but now that 4 gb of ram is like $50, saving the 128 mb of ram you get from running 2k over xp definitely isn't worth it. Considering with some tweaking you can make the xp ui look and act almost identical to the 2k ui, the only thing 2k has going for it is nostalgia. If you actually try to use it (I run into machines still running 2k every now and then in my work) you will realize it's a piece of crap.
Information like the identity of all CIA agents would be pointless to take down once its public. The fact the wikileaks got a hold of it alone means the list is compromised, and it's safe to assume every enemy and foreign government already has it or will have it. A large scale reaction by the US government would just legitimize the accuracy of the list. Foreign intelligence agencies don't sit at their desks waiting for big intelligence leaks to hit the front page of digg you know. Once information like that, or the blacklist for that matter, hits the internet, it's over. Someone determined enough will find it, wikileaks is just a convenient place to see it all aggregated together.
That's why people normally hunt for deer in forests, not suburban neighborhoods. New Yorkers are also surprisingly closed minded, they got mad when I went duck hunting with my shotgun in Central Park.
Assuming it's something I actually want to start with (aka it does something not done before on my platform of choice, or does it better then any alternatives) a program with bugs I can use now is better then one with no bugs due to be released "sometime". Obviously there's a point where bugs make it unusable, or inferior to it's more mature competitors.
I've yet to see a single program (that actually accomplished a sophisticated task), whether its been in development for a month or 10 years, that didn't have some form of bugs. Software that never gets released, or gets released after it is obsolete, is no good to anyone. Accurately identifying and prioritizing bugs that serious show stoppers is a great tool.
I owned an Axim. At the time I bought it, they had the same or better specs then the iPaqs for $50-$100 less. They ran the same OS (Windows Mobile) and a year or so down the line when MS updated, Axim owners got a free update and owners of the HP model I had considered at the same time got the shaft. Really the only place HP beat them was on appearance.
It seems more likely that Dell decided there was not a lot of money to be made in pda's (they have always been a niche market) and gave up their slowly gaining market share to go chase the iPod.
Every serious firewall I've seen defaults to deny unless the traffic matches a rule allowing it. Sure you can mis-configure the firewall and allow all traffic through, but thats true of all security equipment. I don't know many admins that wouldn't trade having to doublecheck their firewall configs to be rid of the headaches of NAT forever.
The point of a journal is to allow the file system to return to a defined state in the case the unexpected happens. This keeps the whole file system from being fucked by a crash or sudden data loss. It's better to know you lost some data, then have the filesystem in a state where some data is corrupt but you have no way to tell where or what it is. The situation here is ext 4 has increased the timeframe between commits. This increases performance at the cost of losing more data if a crash happens. Total crashes are pretty rare these days (unless you run some really shitty code) and UPS's are inexpensive. Hell my XP system has Blue Screened once over the last two years, and it was directly related to a beta nvidia driver.
If your system is likely to crash or lose power, don't use ext4.
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That's not technically correct. There were 2 ways of running old mac os apps. Apple released libraries and api's (I believe it was referred to as Cocoa at the time but its been a long time). Apps built using them could run unmodified on Os X and older OS's. The interesting part was this was released a before OS X was released, so many apps were already built with it by the time OS X was released. These apps were not technically native OS X apps, and took a performance hit compared to native OS X apps, but it was very easy to modify existing apps to use it. I remember Photoshop taking a lot of heat for taking a very long time to create an OS X native version. There was however the ability to boot the old OS under OS X, and run older apps. There was a heavy performance hit for this, especially if you only needed 1 app. I think Apple phased it out fairly quickly as it soon became unnecessary.
Don't forget you can carry around a bunch of games with 1 memory stick, plus media and music, emulators, etc. The real value in the psp was it could do a lot more then just games. Sony's retarded restrictions to try to promote their formats, media and agenda make a non-hacked psp look like a worthless pile of crap next to a hacked one, even if you never intend to pirate a game. If they wanted to make the psp a runaway success, they should have allowed homebrew from the start, and sold games online to be downloaded to a (dirt-cheap) standard sd card. Instead they tried to push the abortion that is umd (tiny optical disks in a portable player? really?) and the memory stick format. Nevermind you can buy an sd card with 4x the capacity for the same price, from a reputable company (thus avoiding the dirt-slow counterfeit problem Memory Sticks have) Sony has to push their dead on arrival proprietary format. The iPhone store pretty much proves if you combine bored users with wifi access and a store offering inexpensive games and apps they can have right away, its pretty much a license to print money. It's hard to make an argument for why you should buy instead of pirate when even ignoring the monetary component, the piracy experience is better in every possible way.
I know purists will hate this, but another solution would be to create a standardized way to display tibetan without the letter combination. Just like japanese has a more or less standardized process for displaying japanese words in the roman alphabet, a way to do something simliar in Tibetan would be useful. Spending a ton of time modifying all western software to use advanced typography to display Tibetan "correctly" could well backfire. The end result would be the effort required would result in few programs being translated at all, and another language becoming the defacto standard for computer savvy Tibetans. That road leads to youth with minimal skills in their own cultural language.
USB is slow, and is CPU dependent. What you gain in offloading the ssl to an usb device you would lose a decent chunk of to USB overhead. USB is the redheaded step-child of the server world for a reason.
Because I have yet to see a single legitimate reason NOT to upgrade XP from SP2 to SP3? The real question is why bother supporting users who are too lazy/stubborn to help themselves. Besides, it's not like it will suddenly break Firefox on sp2. It just means if you have an issue, they can say "upgrade to sp3 and see if you have the same problem". If your company's apps are such piles of shit that installing what is basically a collection of the hotfixes and security patches that were available before (although in the cases of some hotfixes they were not released except by request) you have bigger problems then running the latest and greatest firefox version.
It's not the fact that heavy users pay more that bothers me so much, it's the details of it.
1. The connections at the isp are sold by speed, not total data transferred. SO it seems highly questionable when cable companies repeatedly bump everyone's speed, then at the same time introduce caps. Furthermore, they need the pipes to support peak load, but at non-peak times they have lots of excess capacity. Yet the caps don't take this into effect at all. It seems a much fairer way to do it would be to adjust for the % of your connections speed you are using as well as the time of day. A voluntary cap at peak times in exchange for extra bandwidth at low load time would save the isp money and provide most heavy users with all the bittorrent bandwidth they could use.
2. The reporting tools on your cap usage are generally either non-existent (if you are lucky enough to even have published caps) or extremely basic. Unless you have the equipment and technical know-how to set something up yourself, you are generally left with a very rough educated guess at how close the cap you are. And if you do monitor it yourself, and have a discrepancy with the ISP's monitors, there is no mechanism for contesting or debating it.
3. The overage fees are always ridiculously out of sync with the extra costs involved. Considering that presumably your basic subscription pays for all fixed costs, such as maintaining the physical connection and networking, billing, tech support, etc. the only difference between a user at the cap and a user at double the cap is the extra bandwidth used. Yet the fees are often so high at to be ridiculous. $1 per gigabyte? You mean to tell me after all the fixed costs have been paid for, it costs them $1 per gigabyte? If that were true, there is no way they could be making a profit off regular subscribers. It's obvious this is not a "pay your fair share" price. This is an extortion price. They know heavy users make them less profit (the downside of a fixed rate "unlimited" model) and they know the grandma's of the world want a flat rate price even if they never use more then 5% of their capacity. So the caps and ridiculous fees are a way to slant the table in their favor, chasing off heavy users while still maintaining the pretense of flat-rate prices. They know in many areas they are a defacto monopoly, so if they were to just tell people "No we won't sell our service to you" they would be in trouble. So they create pricing policies that have the same effect.
The real crime here was the utter incompetence of the purchasers of these machines. They cost ridiculous amounts of money, but run Windows with an Access database in the background. I'm not anti-Windows, even though I like open source software a lot, I still use Windows in my day to day, and have no problems with it. that said, I would have fired anyone who suggested using windows for a voting machine. The concept is so ridiculous from an engineering stand point it's beyond words. Electronic voting can be done, but it would require sound engineering on every step of the process. These machines seem to be slapped together by the laziest and sloppiest vb programmers I've ever seen. It's like on of those nightmare custom app solutions written by a pack of "programmers" who just took up programming because their "web design" company tanked. Combine that with a shitty hardware solution (Basically a generic PC with no checksumming or error correction at any level, with no paper trail or anti-tampering measures). It's clear whoever made the purchase requirements was a completely inept fool with no technical experience. Then again, anyone with technical experience probably realizes electronic voting machines are a solution in search of a problem in the first place.
I have to agree. It's hard to feel sorry for them when they consistently act like such asshats. Annoying the shit out of your customers was never a good business model. It's stupid.
Advertising has a place in society and business. After all, if you have a product that I want to buy, but I've never heard of it/don't know where to get it, it doesn't do either of us any good. How many of us have busted our ass on a project only to find out 6 months later there was a product out there that would have made it easy? I know many people that subscribe to trade magazines just for the ads. Tell me who you are, what your product is, and in concrete terms what it is good for.
Most ads on the web completely fail at those tasks. They try to trick you into clicking, or annoy you into listening. they pop up, pop under, bounce around, cover the content. They play music, they move, they display images not appropriate for work settings, etc. Even if it was a product I wanted, they make me want to avoid doing business with the company. They treat the customer with no respect for their intelligence.
Most website owners are just as guilty. They sign up to some obnoxious ad network, where they have no control over the ads on their site. I'm always amazed at the number of major web sites that have banner ads for sites that are essentially fraud. When you are a Fortune 500 company and your website is telling users "We have detected 57 spyware infections" and "click the monkey to win $20" with animated gifs, something is wrong.
A good example of ads done right is Penny-Arcade. They insist on playing all the games and products they advertise in advance. They approve all the ads (and in many cases actually create the ads themselves) in advance. They make sure the ad is a good fit for their audience, and is something the audience will actually be interested in. The end result is good for their site, and good for the advertisers. They make way more money then they would off a banner network, and the advertiser gets way more impressions that actually has a chance at converting to a sale.
It's the same thing with TV and radio advertising. You can make your ad clever, funny, or factual. Or you can make your ad annoying as hell and distort the sound to make it super loud. One type you will probably watch, or at least not actively avoid. They other has you scrambling for the remote. If the networks had any sense, they would tell the latter group to go take a hike, because all they are accomplishing is selling tivos.
Seriously, who cares about "social skills" on an online forum for geeks? It's not like his family are going to read it. There's nothing insensitive about it, because the only people who will be offended will be people who didn't even know the guy having mock outrage on his behalf. I'm sorry if I don't want to cater to their imaginary grief.
If Linus died, I would say that sucks, who is going to be the face of the Linux kernel now? I don't know him, a handful of people on here have probably interacted with him on a professional level, but I doubt there are any that would really be effected on a personal level. I'm sure there would be tons eager to proclaim "how dare you talk about the kernel at a time like this" etc. ad nasuem. Fuck that. They don't actually give a crap about the guy who died, in fact they are probably thinking the same question. They have just seized an opportunity to be the high and mighty self-appointed moral police, and to that I say Fuck you. I'd take a troll over you anyday.
I wouldn't, because his original solution probably cost a small fortune. Compare PC prices from 1994 to pc prices today. You can probably buy 3 computers today for what each computer cost in 94. The downside of that is they may not last as long. That said, he's damn lucky if all his pc's have kept going for 15 years. In fact, the only reason he hasn't upgraded before is probably because of luck.
That said, while hardware designed to last 15 years is probably extremely cost-prohibitive, you can design the system to make replacing hardware very easy. Who cares about hardware failures if you can drop in a spare in minutes?
Anyways, if you want a system to last a long time with little management, there are some easy steps to take.
1. Use mature technology.
2. Use passive cooling.
3. Provide automated recovery. There will be failures in any system, make it easy to recover from.
4. Document and schedule regular maintenance, with reminders. For example, once a year blow the dust out of the pc's. Clear old entries out of the database. Run a hard drive/memory diagnostics to spot failures before it becomes a major issue.
So do you make a copy of every document you are given, on the chance your access might be revoked? Consider this scenario:
I hire a new contractor. To do his job, he requires access to confidential company documents. I give him that access, along with an agreement that the information he can access is confidential, and should not be copied or shared. Now he CAN break that agreement at any time, and I probably would never find out. But it would be highly unprofessional to do so, and since our financial interests at least in theory align (good news for the company is generally good news for the employees, even if they don't see a direct benefit) he has no real reason to violate that policy.
Now lets say I have to fire him cause he keeps slapping the secretary on the butt. Now he's pissed off at me, and the company, and probably looking for a job with my competitors. Now he is much more likely to violate that policy, and I have fewer avenues of redress if he does. After all, before he risked losing a job he already had, as well as guaranteeing a bad reference from me. So if he didn't make a copy before, he is going to now.
It's true that if you give them access at one time, and can revoke it later, they have a window of opportunity to copy that information. But if that window closes, and they didn't seize the opportunity, that's one less person with your data.
It's true there is no way to stop someone from keeping your data once they have access to it. But it doesn't happen automatically, they have to take the steps to do it. If you hire someone that's out to steal your data from the start, you are screwed. But chances are that's not the case.
Somehow I'm sure there is work that needs to be done around campus, that student's can do, without computer labs. I'm not saying toss the labs, but there's no reason to assume closing the labs would mean firing all the student employees. Most of the staff I've seen in the computer lab spent 99% of their time working on their studies or reading a book or browsing the internet, and the other 1% putting paper/toner in the printer. A more useful use of those resources might be a central helpdesk, where they can provide basic computer help and training. I know my school could really have used some people who just went around training and informing staff on how to use all the technological tools available to them. Lots of professors wasted time reimplementing things the school had already done for them, if they just knew where to look. For example, there was a system that automatically created a website and discussion board for each class, that allowed students to contact each other, the professor to post extra information, etc. Few of the staff outside the IT department ever used it, or knew it existed, but would instead try to set something up on their personal page or on a free service like yahoo groups or something. The point being, if you suddenly have 200+ computer savvy workers available, you can easily find productive things for them to do.
I know at least at my school, they had a number of computer labs. The largest were big, general purpose labs, with little more then a web browser and e-mail. These were always deserted. I found myself spending a lot of time in them for a period of about a week when my power supply died under warranty and I was waiting on the RMA. I never saw them used more then 25%. Of course part of that is probably because they were locked down heavily and ran pretty slowly. They also had smaller, special purpose computer labs in the various departments, that were always packed. Even though they were less conveniently located, they had better computers and the various specialized software used in courses. Furthermore, they also often felt more comfortable, because you would be surrounded by peers in your department, and didn't have that "empty library" atmosphere where people talk in hushed whispers.
The other computers that were ALWAYS in use was the first floor of the library. The library had a coffee shop, and lots of computers and tables that made it easy for group collaboration.
It seems to me that if you are a college administrator, you should probably spend a day in any computer lab you are investing resources in. See if it's being used, see what it's used for, and talk to the student's about why they chose that particular lab. Some are probably underused, some are probably in high demand. The prevalence of personal computers probably means the days of students packing the room just to use a word processor are probably over. That doesn't mean labs over all are done for.
So how come in every newspaper I read about a subject I have personal, first hand knowledge about, they get it completely wrong? I have had the experience of being completely misquoted in a newspaper article, where something I said was completely changed (and I knew I was speaking to a reporter, and I had approx. 8 witnesses who all agreed I was misquoted) and a complaint to the editor didn't even get a retraction. Whenever I see a news article in my local paper about technology or science, it is completely and totally wrong. Remember all those old articles about the "internet super-highway"? Or how about whenever the papers bring up violent video games (apparently every game ever is named Doom or Grand Theft Auto). Now if the only reason I see this blatant misinformation is because I have first-hand knowledge of the thing they are talking about, why should I believe they are getting everything else right? Frankly most bloggers seem down right competent next to them, and I hate the word blog with a passion.
Really, our failure as a nation has been to pretend their viewpoint has merit (everyone is a beatiful snowflake after all) instead of calling those people stupid, and ignoring everything they say.
I read it, and that's what made me conclude it was a waste of time. If you are an amateur, what good does listening to another amateur read off lines from Apple's PR sheet do you? That's what he did. All the reasons are pretty much prefaced with "Apple said". If you asked Dell why their hard drives have a markup they'd tell you the same line of BS. Last I saw the tagline for the site was "News for Nerds" not "Regurgitate PR crap without question". Now if he had replaced some Xserve drives with aftermarket drives, and tested them against the official Apple ones, that would be both relevant and interesting. Hell if he had bought one, taken it apart, and posted an analysis of what goes in to making one (from the brand of HD used, the quality of the carrier, etc. That would be interesting. To send Apple an e-mail asking them "Hey why should I pay you extra money to buy your official hard drives over the Newegg daily deal" and copy and paste their response is a waste of everyone's time. I read the article because the story title "Going Deep Inside Xserve Apple Drive Modules" led me to believe that there might actually be something unique about them, and the article would actually look at what's inside.
This retarded fluff piece aside, the reason people buy (and pay a premium) for oem "blessed" hard drive replacements is because they JUST FUCKING WORK. If I save $100 on a hard drive, but spend two hours dicking with the raid controller to get it to play nice, or find out that it is in fact 2 mb smaller then the other drives, and now the raid won't rebuild, or has some firmware issue that I now need to rig up something to update, etc. I've lost money.
There is value in having everything already tested, and all your equipment in a "supported" configuration. When you have problems it makes it that much easier.
The fact that this article was apparently written by someone who does not know the difference between SAS and SATA makes it completely worthless. Clearly they are not qualified to admin the server they do have, much less write articles about the technical benefits of apple drives over other replacements.
Lower memory usage, in exchange for a worse ui (unless you like low res icons), no security features (say goodbye to NX bit and other hardening features) and generally at this point worse in every way. Now when XP first came out, it was reasonable to keep using 2k for quite awhile, but now that 4 gb of ram is like $50, saving the 128 mb of ram you get from running 2k over xp definitely isn't worth it. Considering with some tweaking you can make the xp ui look and act almost identical to the 2k ui, the only thing 2k has going for it is nostalgia. If you actually try to use it (I run into machines still running 2k every now and then in my work) you will realize it's a piece of crap.
Information like the identity of all CIA agents would be pointless to take down once its public. The fact the wikileaks got a hold of it alone means the list is compromised, and it's safe to assume every enemy and foreign government already has it or will have it. A large scale reaction by the US government would just legitimize the accuracy of the list. Foreign intelligence agencies don't sit at their desks waiting for big intelligence leaks to hit the front page of digg you know. Once information like that, or the blacklist for that matter, hits the internet, it's over. Someone determined enough will find it, wikileaks is just a convenient place to see it all aggregated together.
That's why people normally hunt for deer in forests, not suburban neighborhoods. New Yorkers are also surprisingly closed minded, they got mad when I went duck hunting with my shotgun in Central Park.
Assuming it's something I actually want to start with (aka it does something not done before on my platform of choice, or does it better then any alternatives) a program with bugs I can use now is better then one with no bugs due to be released "sometime". Obviously there's a point where bugs make it unusable, or inferior to it's more mature competitors.
I've yet to see a single program (that actually accomplished a sophisticated task), whether its been in development for a month or 10 years, that didn't have some form of bugs. Software that never gets released, or gets released after it is obsolete, is no good to anyone. Accurately identifying and prioritizing bugs that serious show stoppers is a great tool.
I owned an Axim. At the time I bought it, they had the same or better specs then the iPaqs for $50-$100 less. They ran the same OS (Windows Mobile) and a year or so down the line when MS updated, Axim owners got a free update and owners of the HP model I had considered at the same time got the shaft. Really the only place HP beat them was on appearance.
It seems more likely that Dell decided there was not a lot of money to be made in pda's (they have always been a niche market) and gave up their slowly gaining market share to go chase the iPod.
Every serious firewall I've seen defaults to deny unless the traffic matches a rule allowing it. Sure you can mis-configure the firewall and allow all traffic through, but thats true of all security equipment. I don't know many admins that wouldn't trade having to doublecheck their firewall configs to be rid of the headaches of NAT forever.
This points to a major systemic flaw in our certification programs for voting machines.
Our certification programs involve a supervisor of elections, some Diebold salesmen, and some "scholarship money" at the local strip club.
The point of a journal is to allow the file system to return to a defined state in the case the unexpected happens. This keeps the whole file system from being fucked by a crash or sudden data loss. It's better to know you lost some data, then have the filesystem in a state where some data is corrupt but you have no way to tell where or what it is. The situation here is ext 4 has increased the timeframe between commits. This increases performance at the cost of losing more data if a crash happens. Total crashes are pretty rare these days (unless you run some really shitty code) and UPS's are inexpensive. Hell my XP system has Blue Screened once over the last two years, and it was directly related to a beta nvidia driver.
If your system is likely to crash or lose power, don't use ext4.