A separate vetting process and a delay of a week is insane IMO - with zero day attacks and little info. to work on - sysadmins are better off doing Automatic Updates.
Depends on what you mean about having a separate vetting process. In larger companies, it's a requirement that all patches get tested thoroughly before being deployed. In smaller companies they are usually tested, but less thoroughly.
For example, at the company where I work we don't always test every patch thoroughly. For our servers, we do have a test/development environment that is supposed to mirror production. So on patch Tuesday we apply the patches to all of the test servers and the app owners/developers are responsible for testing the application to make sure that the patch hasn't hosed anything. If it has, we restore from tape and find a workaround. If everything comes back clean, the systems are patched the next week.
For desktops it's a less strenuous process, mainly because there's no critical data being stored on them (at least there shouldn't be). Those are usually approved same day. At other companies I've worked at we have had a pilot group of desktop/laptop users (usually IT and "superuser" types) who would get the patches applied to their desktops on patch Tuesday, and then if they didn't discover any showstoppers they would be rolled out the next week.
Of course, in both cases if the patch were released to address an active exploit that we couldn't protect against any other way, the process was expedited. In all my years I have yet to get hit by a Microsoft patch that actually broke something that we were using. But since I know that other people have gotten burned that way, we're going to keep vetting patches before applying them anyway, just in case. And it's really best practice to do so.
This looks like a complete architectural misfire. I mean ATI's own X1650XT (to say nothing of the 1950pro destroying it) is kicking the crap out of it. Is that an early 2006 midrange card?
More like a marketing misfire. I don't believe that there's anything wrong with the X2xxx architecture. If you look at the X2900XT, it's performance is much better, and comparable to nVidia cards in the same price range. If you look at the X2400 and X2600 series cards, their performance sucks, but aren't that far behind the nVidia cards in the same price range.
Rumor has it that the ATI drivers are pretty rough right now. Reviewers were supposedly given two sets of drivers, one set labeled "performance" and the others "stability". As the drivers get cleaned up performance should improve. Also, I find it interesting that most of the reviewers don't mention which drivers they're using. But I have noticed some discrepancies between different review sites. Some have the ATI and nVidia cards being roughly equal in performance, while others have ATI lagging far behind. I'm not saying that some sites are playing the shill by deliberately sandbagging, but it looks like performance isn't as bad as some sites have made it out to be.
Where I think that the larger issue lies though is that entry level and low end cards are being passed off as midrange by nVidia and ATI. The break down by price point is as follows:
$800+ nVidia 8800 Ultra
$500+ nVidia 8800GTX
$400 nVidia 8800GTS-640MB and ATI X2900XT
$300 nVidia 8800GTS-320MB
$130-$150 nVidia 8600 series and ATI X2600 series
sub-$100 nVidia 8500 series and ATI X2400 series
Now if you've been following video cards for any length of time, you'll see that there is a huge gaping hole in the $200-$220 range in this generation of cards. Typically this has been filled by true mid-range cards, the sort that enthusiast and gamers buy when they don't have tons of money to spend. But ATI and nVidia both seem to be ignoring that slice of the market at the moment. Unfortunately, that's where I shop. So if I want better performance than is available from the 8600/x2600 lines but don't want to shell out $300+, my best options are the ATI x1950XT or the nVidia 7950GT. Both are available from $180-$250, and both will be much, much faster than the 8600/x2600 cards. Unfortunately, neither runs DX10, either.
At this point, the question becomes one of either buying the performance that you want or buying the compatibility with future games using DX10. If you want both, you'll have to shell out big bucks.
For me, the worst part is that we're a good 6+ months after the release of the first DX10 parts, and all of the options suck. With previous generations there would be 5-7 models from each manufacturer to choose from by this point. I suspect the lack of options this time around has a lot to do with ATI's delayed product. With nVidia not facing any competition in the DX10 space, there has been no reason for them to release more models that better cover the market. Hopefully that will change now. Hopefully either ATI or nVidia will realize that there's some money to be made in having true midrange products. I'm just not sure how much longer I should wait.
Isn't it more plausible that the file names have the word "genuine" in them because like many patches, they're only available to activated windows boxes, and that it's just some random bug in the microcode being fixed?
The bug in question is the bug in the TLB that was discovered back in April. Here's HP's page on it. I think that the only reason it's news today is because Microsoft has either just released or re-released a patch to fix the issue on Windows boxes.
The Linux kernel is not currently affected, though some multi-processor apps with homegrown assembly might be.
The problem is some sort of atomic operation sequence. Somebody let slip a reference to the bug on a mailing list today, without any real details. Probably the details are still under NDA.
I did some digging around, and it actually looks like this is a patch for a bug in the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) that was discovered back in April. Microsoft has released a patch for people running current versions of Windows (Vista, XP, and server 2003) but if you're running anything else then you will have to get a new BIOS update to resolve the issue. If you check the major hardware vendors web sites (HP, IBM, etc) the are offering patches to their system ROMs regardless of the OS.
I know that it's popular on Slashdot to claim that Linux isn't vulnerable to the same bugs that Microsoft operating systems are, but when it comes to processor bugs (errata, in Intel-speak) that's simply not the case. Linux does make use of the TLBs. Every modern OS does. If you look at the hardware vendors' web sites, you will see that they specifically state that the bug could lead to a BSOD on Windows or a kernel panic on Linux.
This sounds like it doesn't affect much of anyone with a real, existing Core 2 Duo, at least according to the summary...
Affected processors include Core 2 Duo E4000/E6000, Core 2 Quad Q6600, Core 2 Xtreme X6800, XC6700, and XC6800.
E4000 - doesn't exist
E6000 - doesn't exist
Q6600 - k, this one does exist
X6800 - this one exists too
XC6700 - doesn't exist
XC6800 - doesn't exist
Of course, they probably meant E4000 and E6000 series, and maybe they meant QX6700 and QX6800...
I guess it was the inquirer's fault. But they probably could have just said "all Core 2 Duos, Extremes, and Quads."
If you look at other sources, they do say the E4000 series, E6000 series, etc. It also affects the Core 2 based Xeon's as well. I suspect that the reason that they didn't say "all Core 2 Duos, Extremes, and Quads" is because there is a 32-bit only Core 2 model (based on Yonah I believe) floating around that it doesn't affect.
My company is on the list, top 20 even, and I'm sorry but it's a joke. This is a miserable place to work, with most people answering these things positively because if they don't they get subjected to even worse "morale improvement" exercises.
I agree, this list is largely a joke. If I'm not mistaken, it's based on survey responses and voting. I was surprised last year to see that a company that I used to work for shortly after Y2K was listed in the top five on the list. I was surprised, mainly because my personal opinion of the place (don't want to get sued, of course) was that there were a large number of incompetent people working there, and that senior IT management was primarily concerned with consolidating power and making sure that things were done "their way," regardless of the technical feasibility or sensibility of doing it that way. Pay, benefits, and training spending (as reported in the article) weren't any better than average, and in some cases were below average for the area that I live in (central Ohio).
Fast forward to the end of 2006, and that top-five company acquired the company that I was working for at the time. Normally I would have had some reservations based on my previous experience, but since they had been ranked so highly in Computerworld's Top 100 Places to Work I went into it with an open mind. Unfortunately, little had changed. They still had most of the same people in the same positions. Upper management hadn't changed a bit. Many of their IT staff were (again, in my opinion) either incompetent, unmotivated, or both. The pay and benefits were below-average, and the training spending was almost non-existant compared to the company that they had just acquired. Most of the technical staff that I worked with at the acquiring company had been with the company for 15+ years, meaning that they had had little exposure to new technologies or methodologies that came from sources outside of their company. Unfortunately, their technology infrastructure was still woefully out of date (servers running Netware/NT4/Win2K and 10mbit network infrastructure, etc). They were also severely understaffed and overworked. I was told that they were excited to have me coming onboard because the most recent addition to their engineering staff had been made several years ago, and they hadn't been allowed to hire anyone else since (despite significant growth in the company). Management at the new company told people in our IT team that we were overpaid, and that we would no longer be eligible for raises with the new company (even though our salaries were close the the market averages). In reality, the place was a trainwreck. After working with these people for several months I decided that I would be better off going somewhere else, so I put in my two weeks notice with the management of the old company. At the time I was told by another one of their engineers that I was smart to get out before they completed the HR transition to the new company, because under their rules you had to give a minimum of 30 days notice before quitting or else you would not be paid for unused vacation and would not be eligible for rehire, etc.
Of course, I wasn't the only one who felt that way. Most of the rest of my IT coworkers also resigned around the same time. The people who were left in IT afterwards were, unsurprisingly, the least marketable and least technical of our staff. Many of them have tried to move laterally within the new company into other areas that aren't under the direction of the IT management structure.
After we left, the senior management in the new company's IT department started making up stories about why we left. At first they would tell people that we left because we just weren't capable of handling change. When people pointed out that leaving the company altogether and going somewhere else was an even bigger change, they started telling people that we had all been dissatisfied with the old company. The rationale was that there's no way that we co
Weber, the guy at Microsoft stirring up trouble, was a jerk on 3 counts
* He assumed that Jamie was hacking the low-end free version of Microsoft's products, when in fact Jamie used APIs published by Microsoft
* Weber was rude
* Weber wouldn't state what part of which license Jamie had violated. This is the boring part of the correspondence, because Jamie asks over and over again, and keeps getting back generalities such as "the relevant parts apply." That is crazy making, and I would not at all be as polite as Jamie has been.
Granted, I didn't read all the way through it, but I didn't see any place where Weber seemed like he was being a jerk. He did refuse to tell Jamie specifically what parts of the license he had violated, but he did so by saying something along the lines of "Since I'm not a lawyer for Microsoft I can't tell you specifically which parts you are in violation of, but in general they are the parts of the license related to such and such." While that's maybe not the kind of detailed response that I would want, I do understand why Weber wouldn't want to step on the toes of the legal department.
I did read up until the part where Jamie basically said, "OK, I haven't done anything wrong, and I'm not going to admit to having done something wrong, but in the interest of resolving this issue I'll agree to pull support for the Express version of VS (free version) while still allowing my extension to work with the full version (retail version) if Microsoft will help me word the announcement to my user base." Microsoft agreed and suggested some language. Jamie rejected the language because it included an admission that he was violating the terms. Microsoft suggested some new language that said basically "Microsoft believes that the software violated the terms of the license agreement, but I disagee. However, I am agreeing to pull support for the Express version of the software in order to put the disagreement behind me," which is not only the truth but is almost exactly what Jamie had said to Microsoft. Then Jamie declined to do pull support for the free version, to which Microsoft said "Wha???"
Also, throughout the course of the email exchange (at least the earlier part) it sounds like Microsoft is still interested in Jamie's work, and expressed interest in finding additional ways in which they can continue to involve him in the community, etc. I'm no lawyer, but from reviewing the first half of the correspondence it looks like Jamie's just trying to exploit the situation for some publicity. They had a disagreement that appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of the license terms. They tried to work out the disagreement. Jamie asked for something specific to settle it, and Microsoft agreed. Then Jamie changed his mind and decided to drag it out. Maybe he's legally in the right, IANAL. But I don't think that it's Microsoft that is being unreasonable here.
The MVP status is pretty much irrelevant to the argument. Jamie released an extension that worked for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Express. Microsoft checked it out on Visual Studio, liked it, and awarded him an MVP. Afterwards they discovered that the same software also worked on Visual Studio Express, which was apparently not allowed to be extended according to the terms of the license. Consequently, they asked him to remove that functionality. This is hardly a case of David being picked on by Goliath. The reality is, Jamie has admitted that he wants to begin charging his extension. Dragging out this disagreement with Microsoft and making a big stink out of it is free publicity for him and his product. As usual, if you follow the money you'll eventually get to the true story...
What is the logic of positioning this new device as an iPhone competitor, anyways? Everybody and their dog makes a smartphone, and it's not as if Apple is an established leader in the market.
True. I'm currently using an XV6700 that's roughly the same size and shape as the iPhone. Both have touch screens. While the iPhone does have a bigger screen, this XV6700 has a slide out keyboard which is handy when responding to emails. You can type emails on the VX6700 because it has a version of Outlook that can sync with your corporate Exchange server. You can also configure it to send/receive messages from non-Exchange mail systems. From what I've seen you can't do that with an iPhone. You can also tether the VX6700 to your laptop via USB or Bluetooth and use it as an EVDO network card when you're on the go. I haven't seen anything about an iPhone being able to do that either.
Other than that I'm not seeing much difference, other than the Apple Mystique. Phone? Camera? Media player capable of audio and video? Check check check. Oh wait, I forgot. The XV6700 cost about 50% less than an iPhone.
Now I don't know where you live, or what kind of music you listen to, but I find it hard to believe that you've never been influenced in your music selections, or that you don't know anyone out of your friends or family members that haven't been influenced (or made temporarily insane) by constant air play repetition.,br>
While this may not have been understood scientifically at the time it is very much possible to influence people in very subtle ways with repeated exposure to certain stimuli. I'm not saying that Clearchannel playing the same crap some twice an hour will make everyone go out and buy a CD, but without a doubt it will increase the perceived popularity of the song, and it will increase sales. There are many studies that have been done regarding ways to psychologically "prime" people via relatively trivial (and usually innocuous) means to become predisposed to certain behaviors. I mean, we're not talking about getting Reggie Jackson to kill the Queen of England here, we're talking about getting someone to drop $15 on a CD. It won't work on 100% of the people, but it will work on a significant enough portion of the people to be financially worthwhile.
When's the last time you discovered a really awesome artist because they were played on the radio?
It actually happens to me pretty regularly, but that's because I live in a city that has a fiercely independent radio station that's chief marketing tactic is, "Hey, we're not Clearchannel, we hate Clearchannel, too. And not only that, we support our local community in ways that Clearchannel could only dream of. By the way, check out this new artist...". If you're curious, it's CD 101 in Columbus, Ohio. And while it's entirely possible that they do take some sort of money/promotions to play music, you wouldn't know it by hearing their playlist. Oh yeah, they also stream on the web.
So, how is that much different than Clear Channel or the majority of stations out there today? DJs - where there still are any - don't pick the songs anymore.
Which is why the whole payola thing has started coming up again recently.
If I'm not mistaken, one of the other issues involved the "independent promoters" going to the record companies and telling them "if you want your songs to get played on the stations that I represent, you'll pay me lots of money". If those "independent promoters" only work with one or two radio stations then it's not that big of a deal. But when there are one promoter that represents Clearchannel, that means that a lot of record companies are going to have to pay up. And while it may seem like a good thing to stick it to the labels like that, remember that those labels just pass along the "marketing costs" to the artists anyway.
1) Impact is all in terrorism. There'll be a lot of impact from simultaneous multiple acts on soft targets such as shopping malls, but much more from hard targets. That's why they're hardened. Al Qaeda could have chosen an easier, less risky route than 9/11 but didn't because it wanted as much impact as possible.
If your end goal is terror, then hard targets versus soft targets is largely irrelevant. The terror effect comes from people thinking "that could have been me" or "that could be me next time". Most people don't spend a lot of time at hardened targets. Striking hardened targets is certainly much more impressive, and taking down the WTC not only impresses but also takes out a symbol of western capitalism, but it was not necessary to create terror.
If it's pure terror that you want, you get a much greater effect in hitting people where they live and feel safe. After 9/11, many people stopped flying and refused to go into large buildings because they were afraid. But how do you avoid going to the mall or grocery store? How do you avoid sending your kids to school?
2) Risks of compromise rise dramatically as the scale of the terror plot increases. To have the same impact as a 9/11 through hitting softer targets, a terror group would need to attack many more targets (see 1 above). This is feasible, and of course, some other risks decrease, but it's not clear that they'll fall enough to compensate from the rise in compromise risk associated with a larger scale plot.
This is true, which is why 9/11 used multiple cells of individuals who didn't know each other or who else was involved. And there are certainly other ways of reducing the risk of compromise, like shorter times to train and assemble the teams. Instead of training them to fly a plane into a building and performing recon on the airports and planes, all you have to do is have them buy some guns (or have someone else buy them for them) and pick a suitable target on a specific day.
During 9/11 they used what, 15-19 hijackers? How hard would it be to split them into 4 or 5 cells and have them each take out a school somewhere? While we're discussing the virtues of softer versus harder targets, I bet that if they attacked elementary schools instead of high schools not only would they have an easier target, but I suspect that the terror effect would be much, much greater. In some cases the softest targets can have the greatest effect.
I disagree. None of the weapons used in the 9/11 attacks were particularly ferocious. IMHO it *was* "lack of imagination" that ended up causing it since no-one really thought they'd end up being flown into a building - because while people are (or were) blowing themselves up fairly regularly in the Middle East, the Middle East is a long way away from the average domestic flyer's thoughts.
It doesn't matter how ferocious a weapon it is (and a boxcutter can certainly be used to kill someone, as one of the flight attendants on 9/11 had her throat slit), the rule is no weapons on planes. This rule has included knives for a very long time, and yet boxcutters were smuggled onboard. If those boxcutters had been stopped at the airport, 9/11 wouldn't have happened. For that matter, there are probably another half dozen things that could have been done along the way that could have prevented 9/11 from happening, and none of them have anything to do with being able to imagine someone intentionally flying planes into buildings (though apparently that particular attack vector actually *had* been imagined previously and even made it into a PDB).
The problem with "attacking back" is that one person has to decide to attack back, and he has to go first. That person is almost certainly going to die. Each individual has a much higher chance of survival by hiding and evading. I imagine this is why this behavior is more common than groups of people fighting back in these situations.
The classic conundrum: A gunman with a revolver is holding 15 people hostage and says "If any of you tries to come after me, I'll shoot you." A hostage says "There are 15 of us and you only have 6 bullets in your gun." The gunman says "So who wants to be the first 6 to die?"
Of course, it's not always a death sentence. Sometimes you just get shot and crippled. Sometimes you get shot and heal OK. But I think that flight 93 was an exception to the rule. The only reason that those people fought back was because they had found out (via phone calls to friends and family) that the planes were being used to crash into buildings and kill more people. The choice was simple: do nothing and everyone on the plane and many people on the ground die, or fight back and most likely everyone on the plane dies, though there would be a small chance that only some of the people on the plane would die and the flight could be saved. Would you rather have certain death or almost certain death? Most people would take option #2. The people on flight 93 were in a closed system that only allowed those two options.
At Virginia Tech, you had several options, and of those options the one that had the highest probability of death was fighting back.
Is this really possible though? Can we really 100% guarantee stopping every weapon getting onto a plane? After all, post 9/11, Richard Reid the infamous shoe bomber got on with explosives that might well have downed the plane. He was stopped by alert passengers, not by the bureaucracy.
No, we can't. The only thing that I'm 100% sure of is that we'll rarely be 100% with regards to anything. However, there's a big difference between the occasional weapon slipping past security and 15 weapons carried by 15 different people slipping past security on the same day at the same airport at roughly the same time. The first should be a rare but unavoidable occurrance. The second should never happen.
Regarding Richard Reid, I think that he's been the exception and not the rule. IIRC, he couldn't even get his shoe-bombs to light properly, which is why he got noticed. Had he gotten them to light and explode, he could have blown a hole in the side of a plane. He probably would have killed and injured some people. But he wouldn't necessarily have taken down the plane (though I admit that I don't know the quantity or type of explosives involved). I do recall an incident where a section of the fuselage of a plane blew off on a flight to Hawaii (due to a structural flaw, not a bomb), and while some people were killed/sucked out, the majority of the passengers survived and the plane was landed.
Even a planeload of people being blown up is a far cry from 15 guys with boxcutters taking down the WTC, yet we still have to send our shoes through the x-ray machine before every flight (those to and from the US anyway, the rest of the world is still safe). Why? The shoe-bombing has only been attempted once and failed. They've never caught someone even attempting it since. If you were the sort who wanted to blow up a plane, you could probably bring on the same sort of explosive in similar quantities in your pockets or strapped to your body somewhere if you wanted to. The whole shoe thing is just security theater.
From what I've heard, it was more along the lines of "that was interesting. Now why don'y you try some other tactics, since we still have time left in the exercise"
The books and articles that I have seen that reference Millenium Challenge '02 have all stated that the second time around they "scripted" the actions and responses of the "non-US" team. At least one source indicated that Van Riper was not allowed to issue any orders. That's a far cry from "that was interesting, why don't you try some other tactics." It's more like, "holy shit our billion dollar decision matrix toolset just got whooped by one man, we better do something to make ourselves look good quick!"
The entire purpose of the exercise was to test JFCOM's ability to make use of the Operational Net Assessment, Effects-Based Operations, and the Common Relevant Operational Picture tools against an adversary that didn't have such tools available. These were the strategic military tools that were supposed to insure the US military's dominance into the 21st century. Van Riper showed that while they might be useful, they didn't come anywhere near making a victory assured, even if you had overwhelming force on your side. Of course, that's not what the Pentagon brass was told about it when the execise was finished.
Rather, its apparent that the suggestions were ignored. Whether they were ignored because Bush wanted to focus on other things or that the nature of the ideas somehow rendered them ignorable is unclear. What is clear is that they were, in fact, present and had been suggested.
Really? I can't imagine our government ignoring anything that important. Anyone heard of the Millenium Challenge? The Pentagon put together a war simulation in 2002 as a bit of a dry run to invading a middle-eastern country, and they hired an "outside of the box" thinker named Paul K. Van Riper to play the part of the enemy leader. After thoroughly outsmarting the Pentagon's best war thinkers and dealing the "US forces" a critical blow at the start of the exercise, the Pentagon folks declared a do-over. They basically restarted the exercise from scratch, and instead of letting Van Riper actually do the thinking and leading, they gave him a script to use that guaranteed that the "US forces" would have a dominating victory.
As TFA notes, the 9/11 commission said the attacks were a result, in part, of the government's "failure of imagination". SF writers, unlike some beltway bureaucrats and politicians, aren't lacking in that, at least.
I think that comment very often gets taken out of context in order to justify exotic anti-terrorism schemes. It wasn't a "failure of imagination" in the sense that nobody in their wildest dreams thought that it could happen. I mean, let's face it, there's nothing far fetched about smuggling weapons onto a plane. That's why they have metal detectors at the gates. There's nothing far fetched about hijacking a plane. That's happened dozens, if not hundreds of times, in the past 30-40 years. There's nothing far-fetched about suicide bombers. They blow themselves up on a daily basis in the middle east. There's nothing far fetched about attacking the WTC. That had already happened once. The only "failure in imagination" is the failure to believe that terrorists would combine their most effective and well-known tactics into a single act.
But the worst part is that the "failure of imagination" wasn't the reason that 9/11 happened. It was the failure to prevent people from smuggling weapons onto planes and hijacking them that allowed 9/11 to happen, and those are threats that have been around for a very long time.
It's like Bruce Schneier has said many times, if you're spending time and effort in trying to prevent hollywood movie-style terrorist attacks instead of the routine, more effective (and much more likely) types of attacks, then you're probably wasting your time and resources. We're far more likely to end up with car bombs blowing up bridges or suicide bombers blowing themselves up at shopping malls than we are to end up with some exotic antrhax-infected mutant sharks with laserbeams. Hell, a handful of Beslan-style school attacks executed simultaneously across the US would probably have as big of an impact as 9/11 (look what happened with the relatively minor Virginia Tech incident), and it would probably be easier to implement too.
These overpriced drives aren't all that much different from SATA drives. They're a bit faster, but a HELL of a lot more expensive, and not worth paying more than double per gig.
That's not necessarily the right way to look at it. Enterprise class drives (those with 10k and 15k spindle speeds) are much faster than consumer class drives (with 7.2k spindle speeds). And if what you are after is speed rather than price, then you're better off with enterprise-class drives. Which means that paying more than double per gigabyte is worth it. If all you need is a ton of cheap disk space, and performance isn't much of a concern, then you use the consumer-class drives.
For example. if I have a database server hosting multiple DBs, drive performance is probably more important than drive capacity. But let's say that I need 3TB of disk space. I have two options, a consumer-level 7.2k RPM SATA solution, and an enterprise grade 15k RPM SCSI or FC solution. Knowing that performance is key (and we are talking about a database here), I know that I need RAID 10.
The SATA solution works out to being a single shelf enclosure filled with 15 500 GB drives, giving me 3.5TB of RAID 10 storage across 14 7.2k RPM spindles, and one hot spare. The SCSI or FC solution works out to being a three-shelf enclosure filled with 45 146 GB drives, giving me 3TB of RAID 10 storage across 42 15k RPM spindles, and 3 hot spares.
Both arrays will meet my space requirements, but only one of them is likely to meet my I/O requirements. The SCSI/FC solution will have 3 times the spindles as the SATA solution, and each spindle will be twice as fast. Think about the speed difference here, there's no way the SATA solution could compete. Cost-wise, you could probably build the SATA array for $5000, and the SCSI/FC array for $15,000-$20,000, depending on the vendor. But if you wanted a SATA array that could come close to matching the performance of the SCSI/FC array you would probably need 5-6 shelves worth of SATA drives, driving the cost up to $25,000-$30,000 range. Then there's the consideration of the added heat, power draw, and space requirements.
Of course, you would also end up with 15+ TB of disk space in your array. That might be a selling point for some people, but if your databases only need 3 GB of space then you've got a lot of wasted space. The other 12+ GB is useless. Unless of course you want to put more data on all of that slack space, which will undoubtedly hurt your databases' performance.
SATA is a great disk standard. You get a lot more bang for your buck overall.
That's not quite right. SATA is a great disk standard because you get a lot more space for your buck overall. But if you're looking for more bang, you need something much faster. These days you can buy a single drive with 1TB of disk space. Disk capacity is no longer an issue, but in many cases speed is. Choosing the correct solution for the situation is key in storage decisions.
You can buy 10Gb ethernet to run iSCSI for less than FC.
I'm not sure where you're shopping, but I've only seen a handful of 10Gb ethernet switches, and they have all been dreadfully expensive. So factor in a pair of those, plus multiple 10Gb TOE cards, and I bet that your price isn't any cheaper than fiber. In fact, it's probably more expensive.
It makes huge sense to use the same technology for your LAN & SAN.
Not always, and I think that this tends to be overstated by the iSCSI proponents. This statement makes perfect sense on the surface, but when you look into the details it comes up short. It makes sense from a knowledge transfer standpoint to use the same technology. You can get by with a single person who understands TCP/IP networking instead of a person who does networking and a person who does SAN networking. But that person who handles the networking for the SAN usually also handles all of the zoning, space allocation, LUN carving, and everything else that comes with managing a SAN. Who does that now?
Then there's the whole issue of network segregation. Do you really want to put your SAN on the same switches are your desktop PCs or servers? Probably not. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Sure, you can VLAN it off, but those switches still have a finite amount of bandwidth available, and you don't want I/O intensive applications (like iSCSI SANs) eating up all of the bandwidth that users are accustomed to having. Then there's the speed issue. Do you buy a ton of 10Gb switches for all of your datacenter network, or just a few for the iSCSI SAN? Do you run iSCSI on 1Gb switches instead? What you're going to end up doing eventually is just buying dedicated networking hardware for the SAN and physically separating it from the rest of your network. So at that point, what advantages do you get with iSCSI over fiber?
Many RPG's and MMORPG's to some degree encourage farming (playing the game in a way that isn't entertaining but to increase your virtual wealth). This monotonous activity leads to bots and other forms of automating the game.
I don't know if you've played the game yet, but I'm guessing not since you're asking this questions. I've been playing since launch, and I just hit Level 20 today without have to do any grinding/farming to gain levels, and I have yet to find an item in a shop that I wanted but couldn't afford. Granted, I'm fairly tight with my money in-game, but I have yet to see any reason for farming or grinding in LotRO. Maybe that changes in another 10-20 levels, but based on the content that I've seen so far, I doubt it.
Realistically, you get more money from completing quests (and there are a LOT of them) than you do from killing most monsters.
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A separate vetting process and a delay of a week is insane IMO - with zero day attacks and little info. to work on - sysadmins are better off doing Automatic Updates.
Depends on what you mean about having a separate vetting process. In larger companies, it's a requirement that all patches get tested thoroughly before being deployed. In smaller companies they are usually tested, but less thoroughly.
For example, at the company where I work we don't always test every patch thoroughly. For our servers, we do have a test/development environment that is supposed to mirror production. So on patch Tuesday we apply the patches to all of the test servers and the app owners/developers are responsible for testing the application to make sure that the patch hasn't hosed anything. If it has, we restore from tape and find a workaround. If everything comes back clean, the systems are patched the next week.
For desktops it's a less strenuous process, mainly because there's no critical data being stored on them (at least there shouldn't be). Those are usually approved same day. At other companies I've worked at we have had a pilot group of desktop/laptop users (usually IT and "superuser" types) who would get the patches applied to their desktops on patch Tuesday, and then if they didn't discover any showstoppers they would be rolled out the next week.
Of course, in both cases if the patch were released to address an active exploit that we couldn't protect against any other way, the process was expedited. In all my years I have yet to get hit by a Microsoft patch that actually broke something that we were using. But since I know that other people have gotten burned that way, we're going to keep vetting patches before applying them anyway, just in case. And it's really best practice to do so.
It's not Microsoft partners that are balking. It's Microsoft's customers. There's a big difference.
This looks like a complete architectural misfire. I mean ATI's own X1650XT (to say nothing of the 1950pro destroying it) is kicking the crap out of it. Is that an early 2006 midrange card?
More like a marketing misfire. I don't believe that there's anything wrong with the X2xxx architecture. If you look at the X2900XT, it's performance is much better, and comparable to nVidia cards in the same price range. If you look at the X2400 and X2600 series cards, their performance sucks, but aren't that far behind the nVidia cards in the same price range.
Rumor has it that the ATI drivers are pretty rough right now. Reviewers were supposedly given two sets of drivers, one set labeled "performance" and the others "stability". As the drivers get cleaned up performance should improve. Also, I find it interesting that most of the reviewers don't mention which drivers they're using. But I have noticed some discrepancies between different review sites. Some have the ATI and nVidia cards being roughly equal in performance, while others have ATI lagging far behind. I'm not saying that some sites are playing the shill by deliberately sandbagging, but it looks like performance isn't as bad as some sites have made it out to be.
Where I think that the larger issue lies though is that entry level and low end cards are being passed off as midrange by nVidia and ATI. The break down by price point is as follows:
$800+ nVidia 8800 Ultra
$500+ nVidia 8800GTX
$400 nVidia 8800GTS-640MB and ATI X2900XT
$300 nVidia 8800GTS-320MB
$130-$150 nVidia 8600 series and ATI X2600 series
sub-$100 nVidia 8500 series and ATI X2400 series
Now if you've been following video cards for any length of time, you'll see that there is a huge gaping hole in the $200-$220 range in this generation of cards. Typically this has been filled by true mid-range cards, the sort that enthusiast and gamers buy when they don't have tons of money to spend. But ATI and nVidia both seem to be ignoring that slice of the market at the moment. Unfortunately, that's where I shop. So if I want better performance than is available from the 8600/x2600 lines but don't want to shell out $300+, my best options are the ATI x1950XT or the nVidia 7950GT. Both are available from $180-$250, and both will be much, much faster than the 8600/x2600 cards. Unfortunately, neither runs DX10, either.
At this point, the question becomes one of either buying the performance that you want or buying the compatibility with future games using DX10. If you want both, you'll have to shell out big bucks.
For me, the worst part is that we're a good 6+ months after the release of the first DX10 parts, and all of the options suck. With previous generations there would be 5-7 models from each manufacturer to choose from by this point. I suspect the lack of options this time around has a lot to do with ATI's delayed product. With nVidia not facing any competition in the DX10 space, there has been no reason for them to release more models that better cover the market. Hopefully that will change now. Hopefully either ATI or nVidia will realize that there's some money to be made in having true midrange products. I'm just not sure how much longer I should wait.
The mobile Core 2 Duo chips (T7xxx) are 64-bit, but missing from the list as well.
True, but they are also affected nonetheless, both the T5000 and T7000 series.
Isn't it more plausible that the file names have the word "genuine" in them because like many patches, they're only available to activated windows boxes, and that it's just some random bug in the microcode being fixed?
The bug in question is the bug in the TLB that was discovered back in April. Here's HP's page on it. I think that the only reason it's news today is because Microsoft has either just released or re-released a patch to fix the issue on Windows boxes.
The Linux kernel is not currently affected, though some multi-processor apps with homegrown assembly might be.
The problem is some sort of atomic operation sequence. Somebody let slip a reference to the bug on a mailing list today, without any real details. Probably the details are still under NDA.
I did some digging around, and it actually looks like this is a patch for a bug in the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) that was discovered back in April. Microsoft has released a patch for people running current versions of Windows (Vista, XP, and server 2003) but if you're running anything else then you will have to get a new BIOS update to resolve the issue. If you check the major hardware vendors web sites (HP, IBM, etc) the are offering patches to their system ROMs regardless of the OS.
I know that it's popular on Slashdot to claim that Linux isn't vulnerable to the same bugs that Microsoft operating systems are, but when it comes to processor bugs (errata, in Intel-speak) that's simply not the case. Linux does make use of the TLBs. Every modern OS does. If you look at the hardware vendors' web sites, you will see that they specifically state that the bug could lead to a BSOD on Windows or a kernel panic on Linux.
This sounds like it doesn't affect much of anyone with a real, existing Core 2 Duo, at least according to the summary...
Affected processors include Core 2 Duo E4000/E6000, Core 2 Quad Q6600, Core 2 Xtreme X6800, XC6700, and XC6800.
E4000 - doesn't exist
E6000 - doesn't exist
Q6600 - k, this one does exist
X6800 - this one exists too
XC6700 - doesn't exist
XC6800 - doesn't exist
Of course, they probably meant E4000 and E6000 series, and maybe they meant QX6700 and QX6800...
I guess it was the inquirer's fault. But they probably could have just said "all Core 2 Duos, Extremes, and Quads."
If you look at other sources, they do say the E4000 series, E6000 series, etc. It also affects the Core 2 based Xeon's as well. I suspect that the reason that they didn't say "all Core 2 Duos, Extremes, and Quads" is because there is a 32-bit only Core 2 model (based on Yonah I believe) floating around that it doesn't affect.
My company is on the list, top 20 even, and I'm sorry but it's a joke. This is a miserable place to work, with most people answering these things positively because if they don't they get subjected to even worse "morale improvement" exercises.
I agree, this list is largely a joke. If I'm not mistaken, it's based on survey responses and voting. I was surprised last year to see that a company that I used to work for shortly after Y2K was listed in the top five on the list. I was surprised, mainly because my personal opinion of the place (don't want to get sued, of course) was that there were a large number of incompetent people working there, and that senior IT management was primarily concerned with consolidating power and making sure that things were done "their way," regardless of the technical feasibility or sensibility of doing it that way. Pay, benefits, and training spending (as reported in the article) weren't any better than average, and in some cases were below average for the area that I live in (central Ohio).
Fast forward to the end of 2006, and that top-five company acquired the company that I was working for at the time. Normally I would have had some reservations based on my previous experience, but since they had been ranked so highly in Computerworld's Top 100 Places to Work I went into it with an open mind. Unfortunately, little had changed. They still had most of the same people in the same positions. Upper management hadn't changed a bit. Many of their IT staff were (again, in my opinion) either incompetent, unmotivated, or both. The pay and benefits were below-average, and the training spending was almost non-existant compared to the company that they had just acquired. Most of the technical staff that I worked with at the acquiring company had been with the company for 15+ years, meaning that they had had little exposure to new technologies or methodologies that came from sources outside of their company. Unfortunately, their technology infrastructure was still woefully out of date (servers running Netware/NT4/Win2K and 10mbit network infrastructure, etc). They were also severely understaffed and overworked. I was told that they were excited to have me coming onboard because the most recent addition to their engineering staff had been made several years ago, and they hadn't been allowed to hire anyone else since (despite significant growth in the company). Management at the new company told people in our IT team that we were overpaid, and that we would no longer be eligible for raises with the new company (even though our salaries were close the the market averages). In reality, the place was a trainwreck. After working with these people for several months I decided that I would be better off going somewhere else, so I put in my two weeks notice with the management of the old company. At the time I was told by another one of their engineers that I was smart to get out before they completed the HR transition to the new company, because under their rules you had to give a minimum of 30 days notice before quitting or else you would not be paid for unused vacation and would not be eligible for rehire, etc.
Of course, I wasn't the only one who felt that way. Most of the rest of my IT coworkers also resigned around the same time. The people who were left in IT afterwards were, unsurprisingly, the least marketable and least technical of our staff. Many of them have tried to move laterally within the new company into other areas that aren't under the direction of the IT management structure.
After we left, the senior management in the new company's IT department started making up stories about why we left. At first they would tell people that we left because we just weren't capable of handling change. When people pointed out that leaving the company altogether and going somewhere else was an even bigger change, they started telling people that we had all been dissatisfied with the old company. The rationale was that there's no way that we co
Weber, the guy at Microsoft stirring up trouble, was a jerk on 3 counts * He assumed that Jamie was hacking the low-end free version of Microsoft's products, when in fact Jamie used APIs published by Microsoft * Weber was rude * Weber wouldn't state what part of which license Jamie had violated. This is the boring part of the correspondence, because Jamie asks over and over again, and keeps getting back generalities such as "the relevant parts apply." That is crazy making, and I would not at all be as polite as Jamie has been.
Granted, I didn't read all the way through it, but I didn't see any place where Weber seemed like he was being a jerk. He did refuse to tell Jamie specifically what parts of the license he had violated, but he did so by saying something along the lines of "Since I'm not a lawyer for Microsoft I can't tell you specifically which parts you are in violation of, but in general they are the parts of the license related to such and such." While that's maybe not the kind of detailed response that I would want, I do understand why Weber wouldn't want to step on the toes of the legal department.
I did read up until the part where Jamie basically said, "OK, I haven't done anything wrong, and I'm not going to admit to having done something wrong, but in the interest of resolving this issue I'll agree to pull support for the Express version of VS (free version) while still allowing my extension to work with the full version (retail version) if Microsoft will help me word the announcement to my user base." Microsoft agreed and suggested some language. Jamie rejected the language because it included an admission that he was violating the terms. Microsoft suggested some new language that said basically "Microsoft believes that the software violated the terms of the license agreement, but I disagee. However, I am agreeing to pull support for the Express version of the software in order to put the disagreement behind me," which is not only the truth but is almost exactly what Jamie had said to Microsoft. Then Jamie declined to do pull support for the free version, to which Microsoft said "Wha???"
Also, throughout the course of the email exchange (at least the earlier part) it sounds like Microsoft is still interested in Jamie's work, and expressed interest in finding additional ways in which they can continue to involve him in the community, etc. I'm no lawyer, but from reviewing the first half of the correspondence it looks like Jamie's just trying to exploit the situation for some publicity. They had a disagreement that appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of the license terms. They tried to work out the disagreement. Jamie asked for something specific to settle it, and Microsoft agreed. Then Jamie changed his mind and decided to drag it out. Maybe he's legally in the right, IANAL. But I don't think that it's Microsoft that is being unreasonable here.
The MVP status is pretty much irrelevant to the argument. Jamie released an extension that worked for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Express. Microsoft checked it out on Visual Studio, liked it, and awarded him an MVP. Afterwards they discovered that the same software also worked on Visual Studio Express, which was apparently not allowed to be extended according to the terms of the license. Consequently, they asked him to remove that functionality. This is hardly a case of David being picked on by Goliath. The reality is, Jamie has admitted that he wants to begin charging his extension. Dragging out this disagreement with Microsoft and making a big stink out of it is free publicity for him and his product. As usual, if you follow the money you'll eventually get to the true story...
What is the logic of positioning this new device as an iPhone competitor, anyways? Everybody and their dog makes a smartphone, and it's not as if Apple is an established leader in the market.
True. I'm currently using an XV6700 that's roughly the same size and shape as the iPhone. Both have touch screens. While the iPhone does have a bigger screen, this XV6700 has a slide out keyboard which is handy when responding to emails. You can type emails on the VX6700 because it has a version of Outlook that can sync with your corporate Exchange server. You can also configure it to send/receive messages from non-Exchange mail systems. From what I've seen you can't do that with an iPhone. You can also tether the VX6700 to your laptop via USB or Bluetooth and use it as an EVDO network card when you're on the go. I haven't seen anything about an iPhone being able to do that either.
Other than that I'm not seeing much difference, other than the Apple Mystique. Phone? Camera? Media player capable of audio and video? Check check check. Oh wait, I forgot. The XV6700 cost about 50% less than an iPhone.
Now I don't know where you live, or what kind of music you listen to, but I find it hard to believe that you've never been influenced in your music selections, or that you don't know anyone out of your friends or family members that haven't been influenced (or made temporarily insane) by constant air play repetition.,br>
While this may not have been understood scientifically at the time it is very much possible to influence people in very subtle ways with repeated exposure to certain stimuli. I'm not saying that Clearchannel playing the same crap some twice an hour will make everyone go out and buy a CD, but without a doubt it will increase the perceived popularity of the song, and it will increase sales. There are many studies that have been done regarding ways to psychologically "prime" people via relatively trivial (and usually innocuous) means to become predisposed to certain behaviors. I mean, we're not talking about getting Reggie Jackson to kill the Queen of England here, we're talking about getting someone to drop $15 on a CD. It won't work on 100% of the people, but it will work on a significant enough portion of the people to be financially worthwhile.
When's the last time you discovered a really awesome artist because they were played on the radio?
It actually happens to me pretty regularly, but that's because I live in a city that has a fiercely independent radio station that's chief marketing tactic is, "Hey, we're not Clearchannel, we hate Clearchannel, too. And not only that, we support our local community in ways that Clearchannel could only dream of. By the way, check out this new artist...". If you're curious, it's CD 101 in Columbus, Ohio. And while it's entirely possible that they do take some sort of money/promotions to play music, you wouldn't know it by hearing their playlist. Oh yeah, they also stream on the web.
So, how is that much different than Clear Channel or the majority of stations out there today? DJs - where there still are any - don't pick the songs anymore.
Which is why the whole payola thing has started coming up again recently.
If I'm not mistaken, one of the other issues involved the "independent promoters" going to the record companies and telling them "if you want your songs to get played on the stations that I represent, you'll pay me lots of money". If those "independent promoters" only work with one or two radio stations then it's not that big of a deal. But when there are one promoter that represents Clearchannel, that means that a lot of record companies are going to have to pay up. And while it may seem like a good thing to stick it to the labels like that, remember that those labels just pass along the "marketing costs" to the artists anyway.
1) Impact is all in terrorism. There'll be a lot of impact from simultaneous multiple acts on soft targets such as shopping malls, but much more from hard targets. That's why they're hardened. Al Qaeda could have chosen an easier, less risky route than 9/11 but didn't because it wanted as much impact as possible.
If your end goal is terror, then hard targets versus soft targets is largely irrelevant. The terror effect comes from people thinking "that could have been me" or "that could be me next time". Most people don't spend a lot of time at hardened targets. Striking hardened targets is certainly much more impressive, and taking down the WTC not only impresses but also takes out a symbol of western capitalism, but it was not necessary to create terror.
If it's pure terror that you want, you get a much greater effect in hitting people where they live and feel safe. After 9/11, many people stopped flying and refused to go into large buildings because they were afraid. But how do you avoid going to the mall or grocery store? How do you avoid sending your kids to school?
2) Risks of compromise rise dramatically as the scale of the terror plot increases. To have the same impact as a 9/11 through hitting softer targets, a terror group would need to attack many more targets (see 1 above). This is feasible, and of course, some other risks decrease, but it's not clear that they'll fall enough to compensate from the rise in compromise risk associated with a larger scale plot.
This is true, which is why 9/11 used multiple cells of individuals who didn't know each other or who else was involved. And there are certainly other ways of reducing the risk of compromise, like shorter times to train and assemble the teams. Instead of training them to fly a plane into a building and performing recon on the airports and planes, all you have to do is have them buy some guns (or have someone else buy them for them) and pick a suitable target on a specific day.
During 9/11 they used what, 15-19 hijackers? How hard would it be to split them into 4 or 5 cells and have them each take out a school somewhere? While we're discussing the virtues of softer versus harder targets, I bet that if they attacked elementary schools instead of high schools not only would they have an easier target, but I suspect that the terror effect would be much, much greater. In some cases the softest targets can have the greatest effect.
I disagree. None of the weapons used in the 9/11 attacks were particularly ferocious. IMHO it *was* "lack of imagination" that ended up causing it since no-one really thought they'd end up being flown into a building - because while people are (or were) blowing themselves up fairly regularly in the Middle East, the Middle East is a long way away from the average domestic flyer's thoughts.
It doesn't matter how ferocious a weapon it is (and a boxcutter can certainly be used to kill someone, as one of the flight attendants on 9/11 had her throat slit), the rule is no weapons on planes. This rule has included knives for a very long time, and yet boxcutters were smuggled onboard. If those boxcutters had been stopped at the airport, 9/11 wouldn't have happened. For that matter, there are probably another half dozen things that could have been done along the way that could have prevented 9/11 from happening, and none of them have anything to do with being able to imagine someone intentionally flying planes into buildings (though apparently that particular attack vector actually *had* been imagined previously and even made it into a PDB).
Let's assume that 20% of Muslims are jihadist. Do we want the other 80% as enemies or allies?
While we're at it, let's assume that 20% of Christians are Klansmen. Those are both seriously ridiculous assumptions.
The problem with "attacking back" is that one person has to decide to attack back, and he has to go first. That person is almost certainly going to die. Each individual has a much higher chance of survival by hiding and evading. I imagine this is why this behavior is more common than groups of people fighting back in these situations.
The classic conundrum: A gunman with a revolver is holding 15 people hostage and says "If any of you tries to come after me, I'll shoot you." A hostage says "There are 15 of us and you only have 6 bullets in your gun." The gunman says "So who wants to be the first 6 to die?"
Of course, it's not always a death sentence. Sometimes you just get shot and crippled. Sometimes you get shot and heal OK. But I think that flight 93 was an exception to the rule. The only reason that those people fought back was because they had found out (via phone calls to friends and family) that the planes were being used to crash into buildings and kill more people. The choice was simple: do nothing and everyone on the plane and many people on the ground die, or fight back and most likely everyone on the plane dies, though there would be a small chance that only some of the people on the plane would die and the flight could be saved. Would you rather have certain death or almost certain death? Most people would take option #2. The people on flight 93 were in a closed system that only allowed those two options.
At Virginia Tech, you had several options, and of those options the one that had the highest probability of death was fighting back.
Is this really possible though? Can we really 100% guarantee stopping every weapon getting onto a plane? After all, post 9/11, Richard Reid the infamous shoe bomber got on with explosives that might well have downed the plane. He was stopped by alert passengers, not by the bureaucracy.
No, we can't. The only thing that I'm 100% sure of is that we'll rarely be 100% with regards to anything. However, there's a big difference between the occasional weapon slipping past security and 15 weapons carried by 15 different people slipping past security on the same day at the same airport at roughly the same time. The first should be a rare but unavoidable occurrance. The second should never happen.
Regarding Richard Reid, I think that he's been the exception and not the rule. IIRC, he couldn't even get his shoe-bombs to light properly, which is why he got noticed. Had he gotten them to light and explode, he could have blown a hole in the side of a plane. He probably would have killed and injured some people. But he wouldn't necessarily have taken down the plane (though I admit that I don't know the quantity or type of explosives involved). I do recall an incident where a section of the fuselage of a plane blew off on a flight to Hawaii (due to a structural flaw, not a bomb), and while some people were killed/sucked out, the majority of the passengers survived and the plane was landed.
Even a planeload of people being blown up is a far cry from 15 guys with boxcutters taking down the WTC, yet we still have to send our shoes through the x-ray machine before every flight (those to and from the US anyway, the rest of the world is still safe). Why? The shoe-bombing has only been attempted once and failed. They've never caught someone even attempting it since. If you were the sort who wanted to blow up a plane, you could probably bring on the same sort of explosive in similar quantities in your pockets or strapped to your body somewhere if you wanted to. The whole shoe thing is just security theater.
From what I've heard, it was more along the lines of "that was interesting. Now why don'y you try some other tactics, since we still have time left in the exercise"
The books and articles that I have seen that reference Millenium Challenge '02 have all stated that the second time around they "scripted" the actions and responses of the "non-US" team. At least one source indicated that Van Riper was not allowed to issue any orders. That's a far cry from "that was interesting, why don't you try some other tactics." It's more like, "holy shit our billion dollar decision matrix toolset just got whooped by one man, we better do something to make ourselves look good quick!"
The entire purpose of the exercise was to test JFCOM's ability to make use of the Operational Net Assessment, Effects-Based Operations, and the Common Relevant Operational Picture tools against an adversary that didn't have such tools available. These were the strategic military tools that were supposed to insure the US military's dominance into the 21st century. Van Riper showed that while they might be useful, they didn't come anywhere near making a victory assured, even if you had overwhelming force on your side. Of course, that's not what the Pentagon brass was told about it when the execise was finished.
Rather, its apparent that the suggestions were ignored. Whether they were ignored because Bush wanted to focus on other things or that the nature of the ideas somehow rendered them ignorable is unclear. What is clear is that they were, in fact, present and had been suggested.
Really? I can't imagine our government ignoring anything that important. Anyone heard of the Millenium Challenge? The Pentagon put together a war simulation in 2002 as a bit of a dry run to invading a middle-eastern country, and they hired an "outside of the box" thinker named Paul K. Van Riper to play the part of the enemy leader. After thoroughly outsmarting the Pentagon's best war thinkers and dealing the "US forces" a critical blow at the start of the exercise, the Pentagon folks declared a do-over. They basically restarted the exercise from scratch, and instead of letting Van Riper actually do the thinking and leading, they gave him a script to use that guaranteed that the "US forces" would have a dominating victory.
So much for thinking outside of the box.
As TFA notes, the 9/11 commission said the attacks were a result, in part, of the government's "failure of imagination". SF writers, unlike some beltway bureaucrats and politicians, aren't lacking in that, at least.
I think that comment very often gets taken out of context in order to justify exotic anti-terrorism schemes. It wasn't a "failure of imagination" in the sense that nobody in their wildest dreams thought that it could happen. I mean, let's face it, there's nothing far fetched about smuggling weapons onto a plane. That's why they have metal detectors at the gates. There's nothing far fetched about hijacking a plane. That's happened dozens, if not hundreds of times, in the past 30-40 years. There's nothing far-fetched about suicide bombers. They blow themselves up on a daily basis in the middle east. There's nothing far fetched about attacking the WTC. That had already happened once. The only "failure in imagination" is the failure to believe that terrorists would combine their most effective and well-known tactics into a single act.
But the worst part is that the "failure of imagination" wasn't the reason that 9/11 happened. It was the failure to prevent people from smuggling weapons onto planes and hijacking them that allowed 9/11 to happen, and those are threats that have been around for a very long time.
It's like Bruce Schneier has said many times, if you're spending time and effort in trying to prevent hollywood movie-style terrorist attacks instead of the routine, more effective (and much more likely) types of attacks, then you're probably wasting your time and resources. We're far more likely to end up with car bombs blowing up bridges or suicide bombers blowing themselves up at shopping malls than we are to end up with some exotic antrhax-infected mutant sharks with laserbeams. Hell, a handful of Beslan-style school attacks executed simultaneously across the US would probably have as big of an impact as 9/11 (look what happened with the relatively minor Virginia Tech incident), and it would probably be easier to implement too.
These overpriced drives aren't all that much different from SATA drives. They're a bit faster, but a HELL of a lot more expensive, and not worth paying more than double per gig.
That's not necessarily the right way to look at it. Enterprise class drives (those with 10k and 15k spindle speeds) are much faster than consumer class drives (with 7.2k spindle speeds). And if what you are after is speed rather than price, then you're better off with enterprise-class drives. Which means that paying more than double per gigabyte is worth it. If all you need is a ton of cheap disk space, and performance isn't much of a concern, then you use the consumer-class drives.
For example. if I have a database server hosting multiple DBs, drive performance is probably more important than drive capacity. But let's say that I need 3TB of disk space. I have two options, a consumer-level 7.2k RPM SATA solution, and an enterprise grade 15k RPM SCSI or FC solution. Knowing that performance is key (and we are talking about a database here), I know that I need RAID 10.
The SATA solution works out to being a single shelf enclosure filled with 15 500 GB drives, giving me 3.5TB of RAID 10 storage across 14 7.2k RPM spindles, and one hot spare. The SCSI or FC solution works out to being a three-shelf enclosure filled with 45 146 GB drives, giving me 3TB of RAID 10 storage across 42 15k RPM spindles, and 3 hot spares.
Both arrays will meet my space requirements, but only one of them is likely to meet my I/O requirements. The SCSI/FC solution will have 3 times the spindles as the SATA solution, and each spindle will be twice as fast. Think about the speed difference here, there's no way the SATA solution could compete. Cost-wise, you could probably build the SATA array for $5000, and the SCSI/FC array for $15,000-$20,000, depending on the vendor. But if you wanted a SATA array that could come close to matching the performance of the SCSI/FC array you would probably need 5-6 shelves worth of SATA drives, driving the cost up to $25,000-$30,000 range. Then there's the consideration of the added heat, power draw, and space requirements.
Of course, you would also end up with 15+ TB of disk space in your array. That might be a selling point for some people, but if your databases only need 3 GB of space then you've got a lot of wasted space. The other 12+ GB is useless. Unless of course you want to put more data on all of that slack space, which will undoubtedly hurt your databases' performance.
SATA is a great disk standard. You get a lot more bang for your buck overall.
That's not quite right. SATA is a great disk standard because you get a lot more space for your buck overall. But if you're looking for more bang, you need something much faster. These days you can buy a single drive with 1TB of disk space. Disk capacity is no longer an issue, but in many cases speed is. Choosing the correct solution for the situation is key in storage decisions.
You can buy 10Gb ethernet to run iSCSI for less than FC.
I'm not sure where you're shopping, but I've only seen a handful of 10Gb ethernet switches, and they have all been dreadfully expensive. So factor in a pair of those, plus multiple 10Gb TOE cards, and I bet that your price isn't any cheaper than fiber. In fact, it's probably more expensive.
It makes huge sense to use the same technology for your LAN & SAN.
Not always, and I think that this tends to be overstated by the iSCSI proponents. This statement makes perfect sense on the surface, but when you look into the details it comes up short. It makes sense from a knowledge transfer standpoint to use the same technology. You can get by with a single person who understands TCP/IP networking instead of a person who does networking and a person who does SAN networking. But that person who handles the networking for the SAN usually also handles all of the zoning, space allocation, LUN carving, and everything else that comes with managing a SAN. Who does that now?
Then there's the whole issue of network segregation. Do you really want to put your SAN on the same switches are your desktop PCs or servers? Probably not. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Sure, you can VLAN it off, but those switches still have a finite amount of bandwidth available, and you don't want I/O intensive applications (like iSCSI SANs) eating up all of the bandwidth that users are accustomed to having. Then there's the speed issue. Do you buy a ton of 10Gb switches for all of your datacenter network, or just a few for the iSCSI SAN? Do you run iSCSI on 1Gb switches instead? What you're going to end up doing eventually is just buying dedicated networking hardware for the SAN and physically separating it from the rest of your network. So at that point, what advantages do you get with iSCSI over fiber?
Many RPG's and MMORPG's to some degree encourage farming (playing the game in a way that isn't entertaining but to increase your virtual wealth). This monotonous activity leads to bots and other forms of automating the game.
I don't know if you've played the game yet, but I'm guessing not since you're asking this questions. I've been playing since launch, and I just hit Level 20 today without have to do any grinding/farming to gain levels, and I have yet to find an item in a shop that I wanted but couldn't afford. Granted, I'm fairly tight with my money in-game, but I have yet to see any reason for farming or grinding in LotRO. Maybe that changes in another 10-20 levels, but based on the content that I've seen so far, I doubt it.
Realistically, you get more money from completing quests (and there are a LOT of them) than you do from killing most monsters.
...and what advantages do you claim over WoW?
Two words: Tolkien Tolkien.
Also, that seems to be one of the chief disadvantages too (i.e., what happens when the One Rings goes poof?).