They're providing basic subscriber information in response to subpoenas for that information. I've handled a ton of these, although not for Facebook. It has nothing to do with being "interested in protecting the privacy of their users" and everything to do with complying with the law.
I'm curious about your workload. If it's more disk latency bound than CPU or GPU bound, would you possibly benefit more from the addition of more RAM, instead of moving to an SSD? RAM is extremely cheap these days, and I've found that many workloads benefit much more from extra system memory than faster disks, which is why I'm interesting in hearing more about your particular use case.
"If and when an SSD fails, the failure is likely to be catastrophic with total data loss. HDDs can fail in this way too, but often give warning that they are failing, allowing much or all of their data to be recovered." (source: Comparison of SSD_with hard disk drives).
Yes, everyone should have backups. That said, the ability to restore a small amount of data very quickly from a backup sure beats having to restore a very large data set in its entirety, and I've witnessed many more instances of total data loss with SSDs than I ever have with legacy HDDs.
Anyway, how is one supposed to be "efficient" with regards to JPG, MP3, and other highly-compressed file formats?
That largely depends on how many copies of such items you're storing, or in some cases how similar blocks in various files are, even if they're not exact copies of one another. For organizations with large storage requirements and a fair amount of duplicate data being stored for various reasons, things like ZFS with deduplication can go a long way toward more efficiently managing those requirements.
It's great that HDD production is about to increase again, but I think the recent "crunch" was also a good thing in a way. Perhaps it encouraged some end users to get more creative with data storage techniques, resulting in more efficient systems that can do more with less bulk storage capacity. At least I can hope so.
I'm not sure if I can believe you. Such a system would have commercial value, and you should be able to refer us to the vendor.
Unreasonably accusing someone of dishonesty is a terrible way to start a reply. Have you considered that the majority of the software ever written isn't for public consumption, isn't designed or intended for external distribution, and is written to satisfy specific internal business requirements for companies? Yes, the wheel gets reinvented a lot. However, some really useful new systems get developed as well. Sure, many such systems might have significant commercial value, but most companies aren't software companies. They aren't interested in becoming software companies, either. While increased adoption of open source software platforms and ideologies, especially over the last few years, has the potential to encourage the sharing of useful things outside companies, this is by no means guaranteed (or even the norm for most in-house platforms).
Management viewing every line of code developed to satisfy business requirements inside the company as super secret IP is much more common, for better or for worse (frequently the latter in my view, but it's not typically my call to make). In the last couple of years, I've seen some organizations make the leap of spinning off business units to provide some useful stuff to others using a SaaS model, but that still doesn't seem to be very common in the marketplace at large for any given industry.
You're also making the assumption that because you find the problems you've described to be very difficult to solve, nobody else could have possibly figured out solutions to those problems either. That's a pretty arrogant assumption (which happens to be false), and coupled with your immediate accusation of dishonesty, it seems to demonstrate an unsettling pattern of thinking. At least to me, your reply came across as something a second year university student might write, typically after getting just enough exposure to things to think he knows what he's talking about, when in fact he truly doesn't have a clue. That's too bad.
You get one of these, get yourself extraordinarily drunk, and repeatedly attempt to hurl yourself down aforementioned item with your face oriented downward. At least that's how I think you do it.
I certainly respect your views on this topic, but I have to say that I just cannot agree with most of your points. I've worked with systems built upon traditional RCS components that enabled every feature you've described to be applied to any document, regardless of source format, extremely easily. These were internal systems, but they do exist. Given this, I'm afraid I have to stand by my view that everything you've described belongs in properly designed document management systems, and does not belong in individual documents.
What I was hinting at, but didn't actually just come out and say before, is that the problem is bigger than this. Take your typical sales or marketing department at any given midsize to large company. Walk in and try any angle conceivable to convince the employees in that department that using something like LaTeX is worthwhile. You'll have a serious problem on your hands. So perhaps you try to go up one level and convince their management. That won't work out well, either. Perhaps you go up another level and talk to the VP of sales. You'll either get a deer in the headlights reaction, or he'll instantly switch to cost/benefit analysis questions, coupled with training requirements questions, coupled with competitive analysis from HR with regard to how other firms in the same industry are doing things compared to your recommendation, etc. It won't be pretty.
I want things to work the way you want. Sadly, they just don't, and they just won't. In fifteen years worth of working in a variety of industries, I've learned these lessons the hard way. The best I can do these days is push for adoption of shiny gizmos that at least utilize open standards at their cores. That sucks, but it's life.
If the user really needs formatting, they can always use something like (La)TeX, and if they need something more than that, they can use Scribus or InDesign.
LaTex is awesome. It really and truly is. The trouble is that you're absolutely never going to get typical office workers to even read things like this, let along actually use what you're recommending.
What's really stopping adoption of things like Open Document Format? I understand the limitations regarding change tracking, but this seems like something better handled by revision control systems anyhow. In my view, a document should be treated as a token, and modifications to that token should be handled by external systems. Maybe I'm approaching it from a perspective that's too "UNIXy" for some purposes; can someone help me out here?
A better approach would be to assign his patents to an organization that exists for the express purpose of holding patents but never taking any enforcement action. If such an organization doesn't exist, it should.
I think the most likely short (depending on how you define "short") term outcome is humanity giving rise to strong AI, which I would count as a descendant species. That's where I think things would have the potential to get really interesting.
I certainly understand how the budgeting process works; I'm speaking more to the apparent fact that funds already allocated in a budget are being redirected elsewhere mid-cycle. This seems to me to be likely indication of somebody breaking the rules, specifically the "asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction" the submitter mentioned. That job title seems to be beneath the superintendent, so I wonder if the superintendent is aware of what's happening.
I think the old expression "people should be careful what they ask for" applies here. Imagine a planet populated by only women. Now imagine a high percentage of those women having that "special time of the month" at the same time. WWIII... I don't think those rabid feminists were really thinking things through.
On second thought, maybe they did think it through, and were planning on taking Aunt Flo out of the equation anyhow. I'm going to stop thinking about this now, because it's starting to get scary.
Even if it had been true that males would "go extinct" from this, I'm not at all convinced humanity will even resemble today's humans in the millions of years it would have taken to occur. In fact, I suspect humanity will diverge radically within the coming tens/hundreds/thousands of years from other countless other factors that we may not have even considered yet.
I certainly agree that if there's any chance of serious blowback, it may be in the submitter's best interest to conduct the research and submit reports anonymously. Of course, any retaliation resulting from an honest report of funds misappropriation would most likely be a very poor move on the school district's part, and would be great fodder for lawyers and the media as well.
The individuals in question allegedly damaged networks located on United States soil, and we happen to have an extradition treaty in place with Estonia. Wikipedia lists the following references to US/EST treaties:
43 Stat. 1849; TS 703; 7 Bevans 602; 43 LNTS 277
49 Stat. 3190; TS 888; 7 Bevans 645; 159 LNTS 149
Some nations do not have extradition treaties with certain other nations, but this generally makes it rather more difficult for them to get their hands on accused criminals operating from and/or fleeing to "unfriendly" jurisdictions. Thus, such treaties are quite popular, and are generally mutual in nature between various nations and regional blocks.
dips into IT funds when their pet project budgets run low
Given the fact that you work in the public sector, you may wish to consider obtaining anything and everything available on budgetary policy for your school district, county, state, etc. It may turn out that what you're observing on the fiscal side of things actually represents clear misappropriation of funds. If that's the case, bringing it to the attention of people three or four levels up in the chain of command may have an interesting effect, and perhaps a detailed letter to a state representative would bring uncomfortable attention to those mismanaging the funds.
Slashdot Mirror
They're providing basic subscriber information in response to subpoenas for that information. I've handled a ton of these, although not for Facebook. It has nothing to do with being "interested in protecting the privacy of their users" and everything to do with complying with the law.
I'm curious about your workload. If it's more disk latency bound than CPU or GPU bound, would you possibly benefit more from the addition of more RAM, instead of moving to an SSD? RAM is extremely cheap these days, and I've found that many workloads benefit much more from extra system memory than faster disks, which is why I'm interesting in hearing more about your particular use case.
"If and when an SSD fails, the failure is likely to be catastrophic with total data loss. HDDs can fail in this way too, but often give warning that they are failing, allowing much or all of their data to be recovered." (source: Comparison of SSD_with hard disk drives).
Yes, everyone should have backups. That said, the ability to restore a small amount of data very quickly from a backup sure beats having to restore a very large data set in its entirety, and I've witnessed many more instances of total data loss with SSDs than I ever have with legacy HDDs.
Anyway, how is one supposed to be "efficient" with regards to JPG, MP3, and other highly-compressed file formats?
That largely depends on how many copies of such items you're storing, or in some cases how similar blocks in various files are, even if they're not exact copies of one another. For organizations with large storage requirements and a fair amount of duplicate data being stored for various reasons, things like ZFS with deduplication can go a long way toward more efficiently managing those requirements.
It's great that HDD production is about to increase again, but I think the recent "crunch" was also a good thing in a way. Perhaps it encouraged some end users to get more creative with data storage techniques, resulting in more efficient systems that can do more with less bulk storage capacity. At least I can hope so.
I'm not sure if I can believe you. Such a system would have commercial value, and you should be able to refer us to the vendor.
Unreasonably accusing someone of dishonesty is a terrible way to start a reply. Have you considered that the majority of the software ever written isn't for public consumption, isn't designed or intended for external distribution, and is written to satisfy specific internal business requirements for companies? Yes, the wheel gets reinvented a lot. However, some really useful new systems get developed as well. Sure, many such systems might have significant commercial value, but most companies aren't software companies. They aren't interested in becoming software companies, either. While increased adoption of open source software platforms and ideologies, especially over the last few years, has the potential to encourage the sharing of useful things outside companies, this is by no means guaranteed (or even the norm for most in-house platforms).
Management viewing every line of code developed to satisfy business requirements inside the company as super secret IP is much more common, for better or for worse (frequently the latter in my view, but it's not typically my call to make). In the last couple of years, I've seen some organizations make the leap of spinning off business units to provide some useful stuff to others using a SaaS model, but that still doesn't seem to be very common in the marketplace at large for any given industry.
You're also making the assumption that because you find the problems you've described to be very difficult to solve, nobody else could have possibly figured out solutions to those problems either. That's a pretty arrogant assumption (which happens to be false), and coupled with your immediate accusation of dishonesty, it seems to demonstrate an unsettling pattern of thinking. At least to me, your reply came across as something a second year university student might write, typically after getting just enough exposure to things to think he knows what he's talking about, when in fact he truly doesn't have a clue. That's too bad.
You get one of these, get yourself extraordinarily drunk, and repeatedly attempt to hurl yourself down aforementioned item with your face oriented downward. At least that's how I think you do it.
I certainly respect your views on this topic, but I have to say that I just cannot agree with most of your points. I've worked with systems built upon traditional RCS components that enabled every feature you've described to be applied to any document, regardless of source format, extremely easily. These were internal systems, but they do exist. Given this, I'm afraid I have to stand by my view that everything you've described belongs in properly designed document management systems, and does not belong in individual documents.
What I was hinting at, but didn't actually just come out and say before, is that the problem is bigger than this. Take your typical sales or marketing department at any given midsize to large company. Walk in and try any angle conceivable to convince the employees in that department that using something like LaTeX is worthwhile. You'll have a serious problem on your hands. So perhaps you try to go up one level and convince their management. That won't work out well, either. Perhaps you go up another level and talk to the VP of sales. You'll either get a deer in the headlights reaction, or he'll instantly switch to cost/benefit analysis questions, coupled with training requirements questions, coupled with competitive analysis from HR with regard to how other firms in the same industry are doing things compared to your recommendation, etc. It won't be pretty.
I want things to work the way you want. Sadly, they just don't, and they just won't. In fifteen years worth of working in a variety of industries, I've learned these lessons the hard way. The best I can do these days is push for adoption of shiny gizmos that at least utilize open standards at their cores. That sucks, but it's life.
If the user really needs formatting, they can always use something like (La)TeX, and if they need something more than that, they can use Scribus or InDesign.
LaTex is awesome. It really and truly is. The trouble is that you're absolutely never going to get typical office workers to even read things like this, let along actually use what you're recommending.
What's really stopping adoption of things like Open Document Format? I understand the limitations regarding change tracking, but this seems like something better handled by revision control systems anyhow. In my view, a document should be treated as a token, and modifications to that token should be handled by external systems. Maybe I'm approaching it from a perspective that's too "UNIXy" for some purposes; can someone help me out here?
"Emacs is a wonderful operating system. All it's missing is a decent text editor."
A better approach would be to assign his patents to an organization that exists for the express purpose of holding patents but never taking any enforcement action. If such an organization doesn't exist, it should.
No, it doesn't.
Exactly, the kind that has an LCD display and requires a PIN number before performing account functions.
From TFA: 'Homes that cannot receive these alternative platforms will receive up to £10,000 each to "find a solution".'
Really? £10,000? Is television so critical that people will die without it? At today's exchange rates, that USD $15,760. Wow.
I think the most likely short (depending on how you define "short") term outcome is humanity giving rise to strong AI, which I would count as a descendant species. That's where I think things would have the potential to get really interesting.
I certainly understand how the budgeting process works; I'm speaking more to the apparent fact that funds already allocated in a budget are being redirected elsewhere mid-cycle. This seems to me to be likely indication of somebody breaking the rules, specifically the "asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction" the submitter mentioned. That job title seems to be beneath the superintendent, so I wonder if the superintendent is aware of what's happening.
I think the old expression "people should be careful what they ask for" applies here. Imagine a planet populated by only women. Now imagine a high percentage of those women having that "special time of the month" at the same time. WWIII... I don't think those rabid feminists were really thinking things through.
On second thought, maybe they did think it through, and were planning on taking Aunt Flo out of the equation anyhow. I'm going to stop thinking about this now, because it's starting to get scary.
Even if it had been true that males would "go extinct" from this, I'm not at all convinced humanity will even resemble today's humans in the millions of years it would have taken to occur. In fact, I suspect humanity will diverge radically within the coming tens/hundreds/thousands of years from other countless other factors that we may not have even considered yet.
I certainly agree that if there's any chance of serious blowback, it may be in the submitter's best interest to conduct the research and submit reports anonymously. Of course, any retaliation resulting from an honest report of funds misappropriation would most likely be a very poor move on the school district's part, and would be great fodder for lawyers and the media as well.
The individuals in question allegedly damaged networks located on United States soil, and we happen to have an extradition treaty in place with Estonia. Wikipedia lists the following references to US/EST treaties:
Some nations do not have extradition treaties with certain other nations, but this generally makes it rather more difficult for them to get their hands on accused criminals operating from and/or fleeing to "unfriendly" jurisdictions. Thus, such treaties are quite popular, and are generally mutual in nature between various nations and regional blocks.
dips into IT funds when their pet project budgets run low
Given the fact that you work in the public sector, you may wish to consider obtaining anything and everything available on budgetary policy for your school district, county, state, etc. It may turn out that what you're observing on the fiscal side of things actually represents clear misappropriation of funds. If that's the case, bringing it to the attention of people three or four levels up in the chain of command may have an interesting effect, and perhaps a detailed letter to a state representative would bring uncomfortable attention to those mismanaging the funds.