...considerably more than doubling the performance of the current number 3 1152-node dual 2.4 GHz Xeon MCR Linux cluster.
If I understand this correctly, it's saying that a G5 is more than twice as fast as a dual 2.4 GHz Xeon? (1152 dual 2.4 GHz Xeons vs 1100 dual 2.0 GHz G5s -- there are fewer G5s and they run at a slower clock speed.)
This is a pretty staggering statistic. I hadn't really believed the hype about how fast the new G5s were.
I doubt it. There are Linux boxes that probably could run 10 years, but frankly, I wouldn't want anything to do with them for a few reasons.
First, although it's not nearly as bad as most Microsoft products, there has certainly been more than one kernel-related exploit in the past 10 years. Anyone who's had ten years of uptime is going to have some massive security holes.
The second problem is hardware. What were you using ten years ago? Frankly, I don't even remember what I used. I'll guess rather blindly and say a 66 MHz 486 was cutting-edge ten years ago. My desktop machine has dual processors, each about 25 times faster. A LOT has happened to hardware over ten years; anything that's run for ten years is probably bordering on obsolete.
Finally... Even if Linux was truly perfect, I doubt you can get hardware to run for ten years. If you're using IDE, you've probably gone through a few disks if you run 24/7; unless it's a massive server, you probably ended up shutting down even if it ran SCSI. And although hardware doesn't ordinarily break down out of the blue, I've had bizarre things happen before; earlier this month I swapped out a network card that seems to have been possessed for no particular reason. And even if the hardware was perfect, I'd like to see you get power to it for ten years straight. Even on an enormous UPS that can run for weeks, you're eventually going to have to change batteries.
The highest uptime I've ever seen was about 101 days; oddly all our changes happen right around then, whether it be moving to an entirely new box, building a new kernel, or (most recently) have the network card start acting all weird right after hitting 100 days uptime. People have gone more than a year, but I really have to question their wisdom.
I'm unclear on what the police were there for. It sounds to me as if they randomly barged in and asked if their assistance was needed. Why exactly were they there?
That said... I'm frankly not sure I'd have been willing to talk to protesters if I were McBride. He almost seemed as if he was trying to be friendly, although I'm not sure how many questions he actually answered. (It seems that he completely evaded answering most of them?)
I'm also confused... There are several times when someone asks some sort of question, and he replies with something that makes absolutely no sense, like "Thanks" or "Yes" (to a question that couldn't possibly be construed as yes or no). What was up with that?
I think most of us agree that spam is really an 'arms race' -- it's all about us building better spam traps faster than spammers can build better spam-senders that defeat our spam traps.
This idea is akin to introducing nukes to the arms race. Short term, it might give us an advantage over spam. But in the end, the Internet's worse off -- mail servers will be using significantly more bandwidth for no particular reason.
We ought to look at it as an arms race, and consider the 'good of the Internet' -- not just what will win the war (nuking the globe _will_ stop Saddam), but what is good for the Internet as a whole.
But then you're treading closer towards deliberately causing a DDoS attack. Granted, I don't agree, but I think a case can be made that, even if you just click a link once, if you _intend_ to cause problems by clicking a link they send, it's kind of sketchy.
I'm not trying to illustrate that it's clear-cut DDoS. My point is just that you're getting into a rather gray area of the law, and you have to wonder where to draw the line.
The TCO of textbooks may be low, but the initial investment, if you buy your books new and take a full set of classes, is actually not far from what a laptop runs. (Assuming you don't spend thousands on software.)
I agree with your point, just wanted to point out the ludicrous prices on books. (Actually, I used to think a laptop would be ideal, because even my comparatively bulky laptop is about the same shape as most of my textbooks, and weighs less than several of them do. But I digress.)
...this will help Microsoft's goal of cementing WinCE /.NET....
I'm not so sure the use of the word "cement" was entirely accidental. (Don't tell me I'm the only one who immediately thought of the Windows CeMeNT thing?)
Not that BitTorrent isn't a good thing, but kernel.org has 250 Mbps for themselves, and have used it fully. They're currently under 100 Mbps. I'm yet to see them get very near 250 Mbps; maybe when 2.6 is released 'for real' as stable.
I downloaded it before it made Slashdot, and got 300 KB/sec, which is right around where my cable modem is capped.
The theory I've seen kicked around here a couple times (and on the Howard Chui forums) was that it was a power outage.
How exactly does a power outage spread nationwide? (I'm not talking about the recent nationwide power outage we blamed on Canada. It seems that only Cingular had this 'nationwide power outage.) How do they accomplish this?
Am I overlooking something, or does it not make any sense that they'd go down nationwide due to 'power problems?'
Has anyone noticed that there are SCO Days on Slashdot, when all the stories (such as this one) are about SCO, and then there are RIAA Days, where all the posts are about the RIAA?
Today's a SCO Day, making up for all the RIAA Days we've had lately.
What scares me isn't that they broke DNS, or even too much that they're standing up against ICANN. What really scares me is where this will go in the future. What happens when Verisign decides to start deleting "offensive" domains, and decides that pornography is unethical, and deletes all pornographic domain registrations? Or when they see that Slashdot is criticizing them and "accidentally" deletes slashdot.com? (Okay, most people use.org, but you get the idea.)
My examples are deliberately exaggerated and unlikely to happen, but I think you can see where I'm going -- one company pretty much has complete control over.com and.net, which for all practical purposes, gives them control over most of the Internet. Is anyone else worried by their completely unchecked power?
Then send mail to your customers explaining how their "monitoring service" was so horribly misconfigured that it was essentially more of a denial-of-service attack. Explain that you've firewalled that monitoring service off.
However, I recommend that you make it extremely clear that you're not just afraid of them monitoring -- if my hosting place blocked off monitoring, I'd figure they had something to hide and be afraid. You should specifically mention that they are welcome to use a "safe" monitoring service, perhaps recommending EasyMonitor.com (free), or Alerta (not free).
As an alternative, if your uptime is pretty good, consider paying Alerta (a _really_ popular monitoring company) to monitor your servers for you. The hosting company I'm with has Alerta monitor each of their servers for them; this saves from having the hundreds of people on each box each do monitoring. It could cut way down on the load / traffic, in addition to making yourself look good. (A company with publically-available uptime records for all of their servers shows that they're not trying to hide downtime.)
Anyway, block these people, but make sure you keep your customers well-informed of what's going on, and make it clear that any sort of _sane_ monitoring is entirely allowed.
Besides the obvious fact that VeriSign is making massive changes on a whim, why is this bad? There are a slew of reasons why I, too, object -- but they're all on principle (it violates the RFC, it's scary as hell that they can do this unchecked, etc.) -- I'm still yet to find something that is actually broken by this.
Can someone provide some concrete examples of problems this causes?
Note: Verizon cannot block the call because it's not CID available. If it were to show on CID, it could quite probably be blocked at the service level - but it can't.
Actually, I believe the info's there, just usually not to the consumer. People like 911 dispatchers can get Caller-ID type info even if you have it blocked (heh, I seem to recall that they can 'lock' your line open too...). I want to say it's called ANI, but I'm probably wrong.
Verizon has to know the number -- otherwise it couldn't to billing and such. I don't know if it's _practical_ for them to block it, but I'm positive that, at least deep inside a server somewhere, they know the number that's calling you.
Someone oughta create a small residential phone company that will merrily let you choose what to block. I'd pay more if I could simply 'blackhole' numbers that bugged me.
If you read carefully, it logs you in directly as root -- you're never even prompted for a username / password. It's not meant as a publically-accessible box by any means. (Granted, wireless + root access to anyone seems a little scary...)
ssh/telnet isn't an issue, in this case. It's silly to encrypt something when anyone can get root on it.
Heh, I refreshed it a couple times (it loads instantaneously), and it climbs ~10+ hits every second. 948 was my first number, now it's 1102. I don't recall Slashdot linking to a site with a live hit counter any time recently, much less one this low.
I've got a copy of the file itself if they go down, too.
Kids Kill, Victim Sues Game Maker isn't the most delicately worded title. I'm not trying to nit-pick about grammar, but I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who did a double-take and wondering how a murder victim could sue.
In America, anybody can sue anybody, but I really think this is a misguided suit and, while I certainly have respect for the families of the victimes, I hope they lose this one. Who are they to determine what caused the murder? In other words, couldn't the kids have been in a deep state of depression? Couldn't their parents beat them and torture them? It seems like GTA could very easily just be a scapegoat here, covering up the real cause.
In addition, I really don't believe video games have any bearing on my behavior. I've grown up playing violent video games -- I used to rock at Doom, and am now a CounterStrike fanatic. I'm a pacifist, and the type of person that wouldn't even really fight back if someone tried to brutally maul me. Granted, there are bound to be some who can't separate games from reality, but in that case, they have a disease / mental illness. The game isn't at fault any more than the disease, and certainly less so than the parents who didn't do anything.
People seem to love to blame cultural problems on sex-obsessed TV, obscene music, Internet pornography, and violent video games. Perhaps people ought to not be so rash. Everyone I know 'consumes' some, if not all, of these, and yet I don't know anyone who's at all violent. I really do believe games are being used as a scapegoat here.
Can someone explain the " Maybe VT can use the new computers to beef up their web site" comment? It loads perfectly fast for me. It looks pretty good. It even runs PHP, so it couldn't be a "They shouldn't use ColdFusion" type remark.
Am I missing something, or was that just a completely random comment?
What I do is I realize "This is all a mess" as I see thousands of files in my home directory. So I created a bunch of subdirectories for various things. (Some were logical, some were just by file type --/png,/txt, etc.) Then, I found that making such an organized structure was too complicated, and stopped before I acually moved anything into any of the subdirectories.
On Windows, it's slightly different. I save everything to my desktop, then when it gets 'full,' I delete just about everything, realizing I no longer need it.
Not that I RECOMMEND these strategies, but it works.
The Anonymizer website has something where you can enter URLs and use it on their main page. (Slashdot is blocked, and recommends you upgrade?!) So I put in Google, and was taken to this URL:
http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.googl e. com/
I guess it gets around an explicit block on Google, but it's not really 'anonymous' -- you just have to look at the URL and you can see where I went?!
Also, what happens when the government just blocks anonymizer.com? I'd assume 'we' would be smart enough to have a wide pool of places they could connect, but really anything publically announced could be seen by the Iranian government and blocked? This sounds like it'll be a neverending 'arms race' between the US opening new anonymizers and the Iranians blocking the new anonymizers. (And what happens when they simply start, say, beheading anyone trying to use the anonymizers?)
I have to question the impact this will have. Sure, we who already dislike software patents are upset by it. But will anyone in the closed software world be upset by this? If anything, I think some larger companies will be delighted that their 'competition' in the Open Source world is taking their site down.
Don't get me wrong; I'm against software patents too. But this seems no different than if, say, abortion clinics closed their doors to protest potential anti-abortion legislation -- it's going to make the other side happier, and I doubt anyone in the EU would even notice. Frankly, I think all this is doing is inconveniencing those in the OpenSource community who are trying to download the programs, forcing those who really need it to find a closed-source (and patented!) equivalent. They're hurting their cause, not helping it. The petition someone here linked to would be a far more effective way of protesting.
For those thinking that CIHost sounds like some insane overlitigous company that tries to use lawsuits to make its profit... You're right.:)
I spend some time at WebHostingTalk.com (a huge forum site for web hosting), and they have a horrible reputation. Actually, you can't search for "CIHost" -- it's banned, apparently due to WHT itself being threatened with legal actions because of posts about CIHost in the forums. But I've read some posts about "See Eye Host" and such.:) You can play with the search and creative misspellings, and you'll find a lot of posts about them.
Slashdot Mirror
...considerably more than doubling the performance of the current number 3 1152-node dual 2.4 GHz Xeon MCR Linux cluster.
If I understand this correctly, it's saying that a G5 is more than twice as fast as a dual 2.4 GHz Xeon? (1152 dual 2.4 GHz Xeons vs 1100 dual 2.0 GHz G5s -- there are fewer G5s and they run at a slower clock speed.)
This is a pretty staggering statistic. I hadn't really believed the hype about how fast the new G5s were.
I doubt it. There are Linux boxes that probably could run 10 years, but frankly, I wouldn't want anything to do with them for a few reasons.
First, although it's not nearly as bad as most Microsoft products, there has certainly been more than one kernel-related exploit in the past 10 years. Anyone who's had ten years of uptime is going to have some massive security holes.
The second problem is hardware. What were you using ten years ago? Frankly, I don't even remember what I used. I'll guess rather blindly and say a 66 MHz 486 was cutting-edge ten years ago. My desktop machine has dual processors, each about 25 times faster. A LOT has happened to hardware over ten years; anything that's run for ten years is probably bordering on obsolete.
Finally... Even if Linux was truly perfect, I doubt you can get hardware to run for ten years. If you're using IDE, you've probably gone through a few disks if you run 24/7; unless it's a massive server, you probably ended up shutting down even if it ran SCSI. And although hardware doesn't ordinarily break down out of the blue, I've had bizarre things happen before; earlier this month I swapped out a network card that seems to have been possessed for no particular reason. And even if the hardware was perfect, I'd like to see you get power to it for ten years straight. Even on an enormous UPS that can run for weeks, you're eventually going to have to change batteries.
The highest uptime I've ever seen was about 101 days; oddly all our changes happen right around then, whether it be moving to an entirely new box, building a new kernel, or (most recently) have the network card start acting all weird right after hitting 100 days uptime. People have gone more than a year, but I really have to question their wisdom.
I'm unclear on what the police were there for. It sounds to me as if they randomly barged in and asked if their assistance was needed. Why exactly were they there?
That said... I'm frankly not sure I'd have been willing to talk to protesters if I were McBride. He almost seemed as if he was trying to be friendly, although I'm not sure how many questions he actually answered. (It seems that he completely evaded answering most of them?)
I'm also confused... There are several times when someone asks some sort of question, and he replies with something that makes absolutely no sense, like "Thanks" or "Yes" (to a question that couldn't possibly be construed as yes or no). What was up with that?
I think most of us agree that spam is really an 'arms race' -- it's all about us building better spam traps faster than spammers can build better spam-senders that defeat our spam traps.
This idea is akin to introducing nukes to the arms race. Short term, it might give us an advantage over spam. But in the end, the Internet's worse off -- mail servers will be using significantly more bandwidth for no particular reason.
We ought to look at it as an arms race, and consider the 'good of the Internet' -- not just what will win the war (nuking the globe _will_ stop Saddam), but what is good for the Internet as a whole.
But then you're treading closer towards deliberately causing a DDoS attack. Granted, I don't agree, but I think a case can be made that, even if you just click a link once, if you _intend_ to cause problems by clicking a link they send, it's kind of sketchy.
I'm not trying to illustrate that it's clear-cut DDoS. My point is just that you're getting into a rather gray area of the law, and you have to wonder where to draw the line.
The TCO of textbooks may be low, but the initial investment, if you buy your books new and take a full set of classes, is actually not far from what a laptop runs. (Assuming you don't spend thousands on software.)
I agree with your point, just wanted to point out the ludicrous prices on books. (Actually, I used to think a laptop would be ideal, because even my comparatively bulky laptop is about the same shape as most of my textbooks, and weighs less than several of them do. But I digress.)
I wasn't fired.
You didn't get the e-mail?
...this will help Microsoft's goal of cementing WinCE / .NET....
I'm not so sure the use of the word "cement" was entirely accidental. (Don't tell me I'm the only one who immediately thought of the Windows CeMeNT thing?)
Not that BitTorrent isn't a good thing, but kernel.org has 250 Mbps for themselves, and have used it fully. They're currently under 100 Mbps. I'm yet to see them get very near 250 Mbps; maybe when 2.6 is released 'for real' as stable.
I downloaded it before it made Slashdot, and got 300 KB/sec, which is right around where my cable modem is capped.
The theory I've seen kicked around here a couple times (and on the Howard Chui forums) was that it was a power outage.
How exactly does a power outage spread nationwide? (I'm not talking about the recent nationwide power outage we blamed on Canada. It seems that only Cingular had this 'nationwide power outage.) How do they accomplish this?
Am I overlooking something, or does it not make any sense that they'd go down nationwide due to 'power problems?'
Has anyone noticed that there are SCO Days on Slashdot, when all the stories (such as this one) are about SCO, and then there are RIAA Days, where all the posts are about the RIAA?
Today's a SCO Day, making up for all the RIAA Days we've had lately.
What scares me isn't that they broke DNS, or even too much that they're standing up against ICANN. What really scares me is where this will go in the future. What happens when Verisign decides to start deleting "offensive" domains, and decides that pornography is unethical, and deletes all pornographic domain registrations? Or when they see that Slashdot is criticizing them and "accidentally" deletes slashdot.com? (Okay, most people use .org, but you get the idea.)
.com and .net, which for all practical purposes, gives them control over most of the Internet. Is anyone else worried by their completely unchecked power?
My examples are deliberately exaggerated and unlikely to happen, but I think you can see where I'm going -- one company pretty much has complete control over
Firewall them off, and tell them to stop.
Then send mail to your customers explaining how their "monitoring service" was so horribly misconfigured that it was essentially more of a denial-of-service attack. Explain that you've firewalled that monitoring service off.
However, I recommend that you make it extremely clear that you're not just afraid of them monitoring -- if my hosting place blocked off monitoring, I'd figure they had something to hide and be afraid. You should specifically mention that they are welcome to use a "safe" monitoring service, perhaps recommending EasyMonitor.com (free), or Alerta (not free).
As an alternative, if your uptime is pretty good, consider paying Alerta (a _really_ popular monitoring company) to monitor your servers for you. The hosting company I'm with has Alerta monitor each of their servers for them; this saves from having the hundreds of people on each box each do monitoring. It could cut way down on the load / traffic, in addition to making yourself look good. (A company with publically-available uptime records for all of their servers shows that they're not trying to hide downtime.)
Anyway, block these people, but make sure you keep your customers well-informed of what's going on, and make it clear that any sort of _sane_ monitoring is entirely allowed.
Besides the obvious fact that VeriSign is making massive changes on a whim, why is this bad? There are a slew of reasons why I, too, object -- but they're all on principle (it violates the RFC, it's scary as hell that they can do this unchecked, etc.) -- I'm still yet to find something that is actually broken by this.
Can someone provide some concrete examples of problems this causes?
Note: Verizon cannot block the call because it's not CID available. If it were to show on CID, it could quite probably be blocked at the service level - but it can't.
Actually, I believe the info's there, just usually not to the consumer. People like 911 dispatchers can get Caller-ID type info even if you have it blocked (heh, I seem to recall that they can 'lock' your line open too...). I want to say it's called ANI, but I'm probably wrong.
Verizon has to know the number -- otherwise it couldn't to billing and such. I don't know if it's _practical_ for them to block it, but I'm positive that, at least deep inside a server somewhere, they know the number that's calling you.
Someone oughta create a small residential phone company that will merrily let you choose what to block. I'd pay more if I could simply 'blackhole' numbers that bugged me.
And you think that's an accomplishment? I just put the Ethernet cable to my tongue, and can feel the charges.
(Took me a while to figure out how to see the images, though. Give it a while and you'll eventually pick up the skill.)
If you read carefully, it logs you in directly as root -- you're never even prompted for a username / password. It's not meant as a publically-accessible box by any means. (Granted, wireless + root access to anyone seems a little scary...)
ssh/telnet isn't an issue, in this case. It's silly to encrypt something when anyone can get root on it.
Heh, I refreshed it a couple times (it loads instantaneously), and it climbs ~10+ hits every second. 948 was my first number, now it's 1102. I don't recall Slashdot linking to a site with a live hit counter any time recently, much less one this low.
I've got a copy of the file itself if they go down, too.
Kids Kill, Victim Sues Game Maker isn't the most delicately worded title. I'm not trying to nit-pick about grammar, but I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who did a double-take and wondering how a murder victim could sue.
In America, anybody can sue anybody, but I really think this is a misguided suit and, while I certainly have respect for the families of the victimes, I hope they lose this one. Who are they to determine what caused the murder? In other words, couldn't the kids have been in a deep state of depression? Couldn't their parents beat them and torture them? It seems like GTA could very easily just be a scapegoat here, covering up the real cause.
In addition, I really don't believe video games have any bearing on my behavior. I've grown up playing violent video games -- I used to rock at Doom, and am now a CounterStrike fanatic. I'm a pacifist, and the type of person that wouldn't even really fight back if someone tried to brutally maul me. Granted, there are bound to be some who can't separate games from reality, but in that case, they have a disease / mental illness. The game isn't at fault any more than the disease, and certainly less so than the parents who didn't do anything.
People seem to love to blame cultural problems on sex-obsessed TV, obscene music, Internet pornography, and violent video games. Perhaps people ought to not be so rash. Everyone I know 'consumes' some, if not all, of these, and yet I don't know anyone who's at all violent. I really do believe games are being used as a scapegoat here.
Can someone explain the " Maybe VT can use the new computers to beef up their web site" comment? It loads perfectly fast for me. It looks pretty good. It even runs PHP, so it couldn't be a "They shouldn't use ColdFusion" type remark.
Am I missing something, or was that just a completely random comment?
What I do is I realize "This is all a mess" as I see thousands of files in my home directory. So I created a bunch of subdirectories for various things. (Some were logical, some were just by file type -- /png, /txt, etc.) Then, I found that making such an organized structure was too complicated, and stopped before I acually moved anything into any of the subdirectories.
On Windows, it's slightly different. I save everything to my desktop, then when it gets 'full,' I delete just about everything, realizing I no longer need it.
Not that I RECOMMEND these strategies, but it works.
...which leads to the logical question:
;)
Can you put Linux on the Segway?
The Anonymizer website has something where you can enter URLs and use it on their main page. (Slashdot is blocked, and recommends you upgrade?!) So I put in Google, and was taken to this URL:
l e. com/
http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.goog
I guess it gets around an explicit block on Google, but it's not really 'anonymous' -- you just have to look at the URL and you can see where I went?!
Also, what happens when the government just blocks anonymizer.com? I'd assume 'we' would be smart enough to have a wide pool of places they could connect, but really anything publically announced could be seen by the Iranian government and blocked? This sounds like it'll be a neverending 'arms race' between the US opening new anonymizers and the Iranians blocking the new anonymizers. (And what happens when they simply start, say, beheading anyone trying to use the anonymizers?)
I have to question the impact this will have. Sure, we who already dislike software patents are upset by it. But will anyone in the closed software world be upset by this? If anything, I think some larger companies will be delighted that their 'competition' in the Open Source world is taking their site down.
Don't get me wrong; I'm against software patents too. But this seems no different than if, say, abortion clinics closed their doors to protest potential anti-abortion legislation -- it's going to make the other side happier, and I doubt anyone in the EU would even notice. Frankly, I think all this is doing is inconveniencing those in the OpenSource community who are trying to download the programs, forcing those who really need it to find a closed-source (and patented!) equivalent. They're hurting their cause, not helping it. The petition someone here linked to would be a far more effective way of protesting.
For those thinking that CIHost sounds like some insane overlitigous company that tries to use lawsuits to make its profit... You're right. :)
:) You can play with the search and creative misspellings, and you'll find a lot of posts about them.
I spend some time at WebHostingTalk.com (a huge forum site for web hosting), and they have a horrible reputation. Actually, you can't search for "CIHost" -- it's banned, apparently due to WHT itself being threatened with legal actions because of posts about CIHost in the forums. But I've read some posts about "See Eye Host" and such.