Finally, place your equipment. Servers should be placed where they most make sense, e.g. don't put the internal file server next to the router and the public webserver on the other end. People should get a "feeling" of what your machine's duties are visually.
Why on earth is this? Do you hold dinner parties where strangers get to come over and reconfigure your servers? As long as you're bright enough to remember from one day to the next which server is which, who cares how they're arranged? And what is the correct order for a set of servers, anyway? Alphabetical by hostname? Ascending order of system RAM? Uptime? Numerical order of primary service port?
CNN.com says the average salary of the striking teachers is $56k/year + benefits, only a little less than I make as an electrical engineer in the midwest. That isn't solidarity, it's larcency, a natural consequence of communism.
Actually, it's the exact opposite of communism. Under communism, the teachers would be forced by the state to work in exchange for food and shelter.
Under a hardcore libertarian system, these contract-free teachers would be perfectly free to agree with each other not to work. They could continue not working until any conditions they chose were met.
Re:doctors won't really help in these cases either
on
Volunteer Work Abroad?
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· Score: 2
This being the operative paragraph:
"Simply put, CIA's policy is not to use journalists accredited to
American news organizations, their parent organizations, American
clergy or the Peace Corps for intelligence purposes. This includes
any use of such organizations for cover."
Re:doctors won't really help in these cases either
on
Volunteer Work Abroad?
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· Score: 2
The only problem with that is that you're officially under the thumb of the U.S. State Department, which can lead to some real ethical frustrations.
Like what? I'm genuinely curious. Do you imagine the CIA is blackmailing Peace Corps volunteers into assassinating village chiefs?
I know dozens of returned volunteers, and I've spent time at Peace Corps houses around Africa and Asia. I also work across the street from Peace Corps HQ here in DC and lunch with some folk occasionally.
In all this time, I've heard a fair range of complaints - inappropriate training, muddled project objectives, stultifying bureaucracy, etc., but never anything like you suggest. The Peace Corps has a robust institutional personality and is not particularly cowed by State Dept foibles.
For that matter, I'm not sure what flavor of ethical frustrations you're talking about, but as a fairly liberal person who's worked in the State Dept as well as a range of other departments and agencies, I can assure you that State is well left of the overall Federal center of gravity.
Re:Volunteer work would be great if you got paid..
on
Volunteer Work Abroad?
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· Score: 2
My God, that's pathetic.
First of all, I can think of few employers that wouldn't let you take a year off for something like that. Personally, I've never had problems getting extended leaves even for entirely hedonistic pursuits such as long-term travel - even when working for the government.
Secondly, you really think it's all "out of work hippies" donating time? Ever heard of United Nations Volunteers? Medecins Sans Frontieres? These organizations bring some of the world's most capable and accomplished people out into the field to do constructive, beneficial work.
If you really can't see past the short-term minutiae of buzzword retraining in the face of proven opportunities to make a real difference in the world, you are doomed to a shallow and useless life.
If anything impressed me on that show, it was that Armin Shimerman really came off as a class act.
To be honest, I'd never really thought about the human inside that all that makeup before, and somehow I assumed if there were a person he'd be about 4 feet tall.
But he was a real live person. And he managed to be funny, modest, engaging, and do a fair job with the questions too. Really put everyone else to shame. This was my first time watching the show... between Shatner's hamming, Roxann's childish tantrum, and Wheaton's ill-conceived schtick, I was starting to figure that all these actor people are idiots when nobody's around to make sure they stick to a script (okay, no complaints about the two finalists, they seemed sharp and decent too - but Levar, "600"??).
Weakest Link is stupid because it is completely random luck. You either get asked what color is clover or who invented the little plastic thing that holds the ends of your shoelaces together.
Anyone would would confess to being unable to get a single question asked on tonight's Weakest Link game should have the dignity to never show their face on Slashdot (or anywhere in public).
I don't think it's that exceptional. My belt is 46 inches off the floor, and my waist - presumably the concave area above that - straddles the 4' mark. I knew there was a reason I had a tape measure sitting on my desk.
What happens if someone throws a pencil through the keyboard's on/off zone?
There is a certain other Slashdot reader who was playing with the Mac's speech recognition for a time when we worked in the same office in a faraway land back in 1993. It was hooked into the menu manager, and any command available on a current menu (including the systemwide apple menu) was executed if spoken.
The crowning pleasure of my long and varied life came from adding a system shutdown alias to the apple menu, and then walking up behind him and announcing "Shut down" to his computer while he was having staredowns with the monitor.
Re:Ssomeone has to say it....
on
Virtual Keyboard
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· Score: 2, Funny
No, it wouldnt degrade the performance. There is something in Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) called a passive sensor. All network traffic would be forwarded to the passive sensor. This would be an easy task for any router. The hard part is the passive sensor would have to be able to look through as much data as the router/switch could put out (like 20gbit/sec?)
One reason the proposal would degrade performance is that it calls for changes to the backbone architecture to concentrate traffic to a handful of central points, for the FBI's convenience in tapping you. This reduces redundancy and network intelligence.
The second reason it will degrade performance is, as you begin to get to, they won't be able to monitor current traffic levels in real-time (it's all that billions of dollars in routing hardware can do to inspect packet headers), so they'll have to intentionally degrade performance in order to have half a chance.
You say that, and then you go on to say that you and your friends use your broadband connections to view international news multimedia/video as if that's some sort of valid response?
I think you missed my point. All I'm trying to show is that, contrary to his assertion, there are different preferences - not that his preferences are wrong and mine are right.
Most folks aren't that interested in postage-stamp sized lossy video when there's a tv in the living room, kitchen, bedroom and minivan.
Unless you have a whole array of satellite dishes and decoders - and some long cables to parts of the world in different satellite footprints - you aren't going to be able to get this stuff on your TV. There is virtually no inernational news coverage in the US.
If this really is true, if broadband is dead, it's no surprise. You can't successfully sell a product if you don't offer it to a wide audience.
What does this mean? Rational actors offer products to the markets that they can profitably serve. The width of the audience has nothing to do with it; the only thing that matters is the relationship between the audience and the cost curve. Plenty of companies are hugely profitable with very small customer bases.
Then again, now I'm a college student at a small southern art school, where I share an OC12 connection with 200 other students in my dorm.
My ass you do. What "small southern art school" has an OC-12? And by what fantasy do you think that your dorm has got your school's frac T3 (or T1, or 384K frame relay, or whatever it actually has in the real world) to itself? There's the remainder of the campus to think of.
Nobody cares about streaming anything . . . Some people want to play a decent low-latency game of quake
You're confusing your personal preferences with those of the general population.
Not in a billion years would you catch me wasting my time playing Quake (or anything like it).
However I do listen to internet radio for several hours a day - even if my monitor is off and I'm just hanging around cooking or whatever.
And I am a big fan of international news sites with video clips. Likewise many of my policy geek friends here in DC do the same. In fact, the access to international news multimedia is the main reason why many of them got DSL or cable modems.
Hong Kong is strange in that if you're even a slightly heavy user of internet (read: >150 hours a month) then its *cheaper* to get broadband (because there is always a minimum per minute charge for dialup of US 0.3 cents which really adds up).
How much is "US 0.3 cents"? Thirty cents per minute? That I find hard to believe. Or three tenths of a cent per minute? That doesn't add up too terribly quickly - an hour costs eighteen cents.
Now, DSL service is a natural monopoly - there is one owner of the phone lines running to my house, and therefor trying to create fake competition by allowing multiple companies to bill me just doesn't work
Um, what?
Why is this any more of a natural monopoly than long distance service? Same story: ILEC installed and owns the wires to your house. Traffic goes to ILEC facility where long-distance company has equipment that connected to ILEC network, and provides onward service.
This is exactly the same as the DSL arrangement used by Covad, etc.
How many other towns with less than 50,000 residents, 40 minutes away from the nearest large city (Roanoke in the case of Blacksburg), have above-average availability of DSL and cable modems?
How many towns have above-average anything? Half of them.
We have seen Northpoint, Covad, Rhythms and now @Home all go down the tubes.
On the other hand - Who is still providing service?
Well, Covad, for one. Our Covad service has not been interrupted and we have received notification from our ISP that it will definitely continue through the end of the year (and, in less certain terms, they suggested they thought it would continue indefinitely).
And despite all the digs on DSL, I'd also add that our Covad service, which is monitored by the firewall machine, has had an average of 8 minutes' downtime per month. That's not bad at all when you consider it's been about 1/3 the price of a T1.
The future is wireless. Why would you spend gazillions laying fiber or upgrading infrastructure when in 10 years somebody will just undercut you with over-the-air service.
Wireless for fixed-point applications is only viable in two situations:
When you're out in the middle of nowhere
When the provider does not have access to sufficient (or sufficiently cheap) capital to fund wired infrastructure development. This is basically only in third-world countries, and it's more expensive in the long run.
In all other cases, wired is much more practical for fixed-point applications. It also offers infinitely more bandwidth; wireless requires sharing limited space, but with wires you can have as much bandwidth as you can pay to run wires for.
Already services like Ricochet were having trouble due to all the contention for spectrum. As bandwidth demands increase it will only get worse.
The only general application of wireless in settled areas in developed countries is for portable devices (cell phones, blackberry, etc.) and these will always lag behind the capacity of wired infrastructure - to a greater and greater degree as adoption increases.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth is this? Do you hold dinner parties where strangers get to come over and reconfigure your servers? As long as you're bright enough to remember from one day to the next which server is which, who cares how they're arranged? And what is the correct order for a set of servers, anyway? Alphabetical by hostname? Ascending order of system RAM? Uptime? Numerical order of primary service port?
Actually, it's the exact opposite of communism. Under communism, the teachers would be forced by the state to work in exchange for food and shelter.
Under a hardcore libertarian system, these contract-free teachers would be perfectly free to agree with each other not to work. They could continue not working until any conditions they chose were met.
This being the operative paragraph:
Like what? I'm genuinely curious. Do you imagine the CIA is blackmailing Peace Corps volunteers into assassinating village chiefs?
I know dozens of returned volunteers, and I've spent time at Peace Corps houses around Africa and Asia. I also work across the street from Peace Corps HQ here in DC and lunch with some folk occasionally.
In all this time, I've heard a fair range of complaints - inappropriate training, muddled project objectives, stultifying bureaucracy, etc., but never anything like you suggest. The Peace Corps has a robust institutional personality and is not particularly cowed by State Dept foibles.
For that matter, I'm not sure what flavor of ethical frustrations you're talking about, but as a fairly liberal person who's worked in the State Dept as well as a range of other departments and agencies, I can assure you that State is well left of the overall Federal center of gravity.
My God, that's pathetic.
First of all, I can think of few employers that wouldn't let you take a year off for something like that. Personally, I've never had problems getting extended leaves even for entirely hedonistic pursuits such as long-term travel - even when working for the government.
Secondly, you really think it's all "out of work hippies" donating time? Ever heard of United Nations Volunteers? Medecins Sans Frontieres? These organizations bring some of the world's most capable and accomplished people out into the field to do constructive, beneficial work.
If you really can't see past the short-term minutiae of buzzword retraining in the face of proven opportunities to make a real difference in the world, you are doomed to a shallow and useless life.
If anything impressed me on that show, it was that Armin Shimerman really came off as a class act.
To be honest, I'd never really thought about the human inside that all that makeup before, and somehow I assumed if there were a person he'd be about 4 feet tall.
But he was a real live person. And he managed to be funny, modest, engaging, and do a fair job with the questions too. Really put everyone else to shame. This was my first time watching the show... between Shatner's hamming, Roxann's childish tantrum, and Wheaton's ill-conceived schtick, I was starting to figure that all these actor people are idiots when nobody's around to make sure they stick to a script (okay, no complaints about the two finalists, they seemed sharp and decent too - but Levar, "600"??).
Anyone would would confess to being unable to get a single question asked on tonight's Weakest Link game should have the dignity to never show their face on Slashdot (or anywhere in public).
"Ten squared" throw you for a loop?
Is that the Solution wherein a giant rotating blade passes over the entire surface of the earth at a height of exactly six feet?
Because we can duck, you know.
This comes up every single time someone tries to solve all the world's problems with a giant rotating blade. Frankly, it's getting old
Check your copy of the script once more. I didn't enter the scene until the last posting.
Ah, but the Netherlands isn't one of those places (nice guess, by the way, 6'5" exactly).
Fascinating. You may come visit me to collect a personal apology for having considered you a pompous raving buffoon. Stop by any time:
I don't think it's that exceptional. My belt is 46 inches off the floor, and my waist - presumably the concave area above that - straddles the 4' mark. I knew there was a reason I had a tape measure sitting on my desk.
There is a certain other Slashdot reader who was playing with the Mac's speech recognition for a time when we worked in the same office in a faraway land back in 1993. It was hooked into the menu manager, and any command available on a current menu (including the systemwide apple menu) was executed if spoken.
The crowning pleasure of my long and varied life came from adding a system shutdown alias to the apple menu, and then walking up behind him and announcing "Shut down" to his computer while he was having staredowns with the monitor.
Or a noseplug.
One reason the proposal would degrade performance is that it calls for changes to the backbone architecture to concentrate traffic to a handful of central points, for the FBI's convenience in tapping you. This reduces redundancy and network intelligence.
The second reason it will degrade performance is, as you begin to get to, they won't be able to monitor current traffic levels in real-time (it's all that billions of dollars in routing hardware can do to inspect packet headers), so they'll have to intentionally degrade performance in order to have half a chance.
It was some sort of bulk deal which, apparently, for most people was the same as having flat-rate long-distance.
Fair enough - but didn't you know that there is a perfect uniform distribution of broadband quality across all towns?
I think you missed my point. All I'm trying to show is that, contrary to his assertion, there are different preferences - not that his preferences are wrong and mine are right.
Unless you have a whole array of satellite dishes and decoders - and some long cables to parts of the world in different satellite footprints - you aren't going to be able to get this stuff on your TV. There is virtually no inernational news coverage in the US.
What does this mean? Rational actors offer products to the markets that they can profitably serve. The width of the audience has nothing to do with it; the only thing that matters is the relationship between the audience and the cost curve. Plenty of companies are hugely profitable with very small customer bases.
My ass you do. What "small southern art school" has an OC-12? And by what fantasy do you think that your dorm has got your school's frac T3 (or T1, or 384K frame relay, or whatever it actually has in the real world) to itself? There's the remainder of the campus to think of.
You're confusing your personal preferences with those of the general population.
Not in a billion years would you catch me wasting my time playing Quake (or anything like it).
However I do listen to internet radio for several hours a day - even if my monitor is off and I'm just hanging around cooking or whatever.
And I am a big fan of international news sites with video clips. Likewise many of my policy geek friends here in DC do the same. In fact, the access to international news multimedia is the main reason why many of them got DSL or cable modems.
Different strokes for different folks.
How much is "US 0.3 cents"? Thirty cents per minute? That I find hard to believe. Or three tenths of a cent per minute? That doesn't add up too terribly quickly - an hour costs eighteen cents.
Um, what?
Why is this any more of a natural monopoly than long distance service? Same story: ILEC installed and owns the wires to your house. Traffic goes to ILEC facility where long-distance company has equipment that connected to ILEC network, and provides onward service.
This is exactly the same as the DSL arrangement used by Covad, etc.
How many towns have above-average anything? Half of them.
Well, Covad, for one. Our Covad service has not been interrupted and we have received notification from our ISP that it will definitely continue through the end of the year (and, in less certain terms, they suggested they thought it would continue indefinitely).
And despite all the digs on DSL, I'd also add that our Covad service, which is monitored by the firewall machine, has had an average of 8 minutes' downtime per month. That's not bad at all when you consider it's been about 1/3 the price of a T1.
Wireless for fixed-point applications is only viable in two situations:
In all other cases, wired is much more practical for fixed-point applications. It also offers infinitely more bandwidth; wireless requires sharing limited space, but with wires you can have as much bandwidth as you can pay to run wires for.
Already services like Ricochet were having trouble due to all the contention for spectrum. As bandwidth demands increase it will only get worse.
The only general application of wireless in settled areas in developed countries is for portable devices (cell phones, blackberry, etc.) and these will always lag behind the capacity of wired infrastructure - to a greater and greater degree as adoption increases.