I was just talking to somebody the other day about the reliability of VOIP, cell phones, etc. in case of emergencies. I remember as a kid when Ma Bell was a monopoly here in the US. We rented our phones from them, couldn't hook up additional phones, answering machines, or any other "unauthorized" devices to our phone line. I also remember when deregulation began and suddenly we suddenly owned the phones that we had rented for so long, and got stickers from the phone company to stick on the bottom of the phones indicating that they were now ours and not theirs.
But I digress. One other thing I recall clearly is that even if there was a prolonged power failure, even one lasting multiple days, the telephones always worked. The power needed to run the entire telco system is provided from the phone company. Each central office has huge banks of lead-acid batteries and backup generators to provide electricity in the event of a power failure. You could pretty much guarantee that your phone would work for days while nothing else in your house did, a comforting thought if any emergencies arose.
Today, however, with the advent of voip, cell phones, etc. it seems like the promise of always-availble telephones is bound to disappear eventually. VOIP surely won't work if your cable modem or DSL router (or your ASUS motherboard) doesn't have any power. How will you recharge your cell phone during a power failure once you've drained its battery?
Don't get me wrong - I think all this new technology is great, but at what cost? Many people these days probably don't realize that hardwired land lines provide a reliability that all these modern gadgets can't in times of emergencies. I just wonder if the telcos will eventually give up on providing that reliability if they feel it's no longer providing a costly & desired service.
Microsoft has always claimed that the cost of a company running Windows is less than the costs involved in running F/OSS. I wonder if the pain that will undoubtedly be incurred by migrating from Windows 9x/NT/XP to Vista will convince some that it's time to give up entirely on MS products. If I were a CTO and was faced with the cost of upgrading numerous machines to Vista and retraining users on new versions of Office & Windows, I might seriously consider using those same costs to invest in migrating to a platform based on OpenOffice and a decent linux distro. Granted many larger companies most likely wouldn't consider this but I seriously wonder if more and more smaller companies might feel that this is a good reason to consider moving away from MS products. There are more and more stories out there about smaller companies dropping MS products because of the licensing costs, and with more non-US governments, etc. stating their plans to move to entirely F/OSS products it seems like the pain that MS is creating might be the tipping point for some.
That's virtually identical to what ING Direct does, which was discussed in a previous thread. The problem is that a sophisticated keylogger could also capture screenshots and mouse coordinates. From that the PIN could easily be determined.
Same here. I block ALL incoming mail traffic from China, Korea, Japan, etc. on my personal domains because of the volume of spam that originates from those countries. The remainder is fed through SpamAssassin which does a pretty darned good job of tagging likely spam and filtering out obvious spam.
You're just trolling by asking about the US, but Cuba is a valid one that I was going to question myself. At the recent UN summit on internet access, it was alleged that "Zero percent of Cubans are connected to the Internet because of the censorship hold that the authorities there have over their people.
President Reagan: Let's help out Hussein, give him helicopters, guns, etc. to fight Iran. President GHW Bush: Saddam is Bad. He invaded Kuwait. Kick him out. Make sure he can't do anything like that again. President Clinton: We'll keep the sanctions, no-fly-zones, etc. in place but leave Hussein alone as long has he behaves. President GW Bush: Let's use 9/11 to fabricate an excuse to invade Iraq and depose Hussein. It'll be a good distraction from the fact that we can't find the true terrorists who masterminded the attacks on the US.
First a troll, now a new non-sequiter-troll. And a pretty bad one at that. Your first troll was arguing that the US/Iraqi government was like Hussein for sentencing him to death. Now you not only try to steer the argument away from Hussein but from all of Iraq itself. No points for you. Try again.
So they've ordered his execution because he allegedly ordered the executions of others. Are they not then guilty of the same crime as he?
Nice troll. I'll respond anyway.
Saddam: "A few Kurds tried to assassinate me. Go bomb the Kurdish village with poison gas. Kill everybody."
US-backed Iraqi government: "You ordered the mass murder of thousands of innocent people, including women and children. You're a waste of human life. Rot in hell. Here, let us speed you on the way."
In the company I worked at we started with a relatively small setup in this datacenter - about 20 cabinets. We started out with rather small growth, 10 or 20 cabinets at a time. It was slow but steady growth until there were over 500 cabinets. Since we started out small there wasn't the option (or even the issue) of doing everying in DC. I suppose if we had gone in and ordered 500 cabinets powered with DC at the very beginning that we might have gotten it, but unless your somebody like Google that's most likely not going to happen.
Wouldn't having datacenters switch over to DC power and then just using a massive battery backup system help with this?
Another comment. The vast majority of equipment in datacenters is designed to run on AC. Most companies simply buy servers from the likes of Dell, IBM, etc. which by default come with AC power supplies. Getting all the customers of a commercial datacenter to switch everything to DC would be cost prohibitive. Then there's the issue of other critical equipment like HVAC for cooling. they typically run on three-phase AC (480 volts). I have no idea if DC HVAC systems even exist.
When I worked for a big internet company who had equipment in an enterprise grade colo facility we looked into using DC since our power consumption was huge. The datacneter was already providing DC service to a telco switch housed within the facility. We would have had to have paid for the colo facility to upgrade their DC power output as well as the cost of running DC circuits from one end of the building to the other. All of that was prohibitively expensive. The bottom line was that the datacenter considered DC to be a special case for the telco and wasn't something they intended to offer to their other customers.
Wouldn't having datacenters switch over to DC power and then just using a massive battery backup system help with this? Or batteries more exspensive than having generators.
In large datacenters a battery backup system (UPS) will only last a few minutes, maybe a few hours. Generators can/will run indefinitely as long as clean fuel is available.
Any datacenter that has a generator will (should) have UPS's in any event. It takes a few seconds/minutes for generators to start up and provide full power when a power failure occurs. In a properly designed datacenter the UPS's provide short-term power to the equipment during a power failure while the generators start up automatically. Once the generators are up and running then the batteries cut out again. When power is restored the process basically reverses itself - the UPS's take the load while the generators shut down and power from the street again takes over. (Actually the generators shouldn't shut down at this point - they should recharge the UPS batteries. If steet power is lost again the UPS's and generators need to be ready to pick up the load again immediately)
Some of these dams also provide hydro-electric power
I forget where I read it but I recall something about this being one of the key reasons Google was building a huge datacenter complex in Oregon on the Columbia river. Not only does it provide cheap electricity from hydro power dams but the river also provides cooling for the datacenter.
The part that I don't undestand is this: Why do they need just one generator? If you're having difficulties obtaining a 2Mw unit, wouldn't it make sense to get two smaller units? You'd waste a bit of extra space, but you'd have redundancy that a single genearator couldn't offer.
I used to work at a company who had a lot of equipment at an MCI enterprise-grade datacenter. I forget the exact terminology but they apparently have different classes of datacenters, and this was at the top of the line. It was physically located in an area where it could tap into redundant power sources, redundant network backbones, etc. It has a total of 7 generators. Here's the Google Maps view of the datacenter. The empty field to the north is meant to house their second datacenter that they plan to build there when the first one is at capacity.
This exploit exists in IE6. It just means MS didn't fix it in IE7. It's not like it's a new exploit that was quickly discovered within the few hours after IE7 was released.
My bet is that bittorrent becomes increasingly popular in Iran to help distribute the kind of content that this crackdown is meant to discourage. True, it wouldn't necessarially help individual end-users but it'd help with overall distribution.
You don't get all of the Siruis channels online when you buy a subscription to Sirius. They only offer a few channels online - mostly music. In fact, I don't think there is a single talk channel available.
From here: Both Stern channels Football Playboy (pretty lame if you ask me) Sirius Left (liberal talk channel) Raw Dog comedy Maxim BBC
and others... So there's a smattering of Sirius talk channels. Not all of them, but enough to keep you interested.
Howard is WAY past his prime, anyway. He's an interesting guy, and is even capable of the occasional intelligent insight. But the daily grind of listening to him go on...and on...and on...and on...and on about strippers/lesbians/his dick/porn stars/etc. tends to get VERY old, very fast.
Keep in mind that for the past 5 years or so on terrestrial radio he was really holding back because of more draconian FCC regulations as well as his own bosses being afraid of lawsuits, loss of their FCC licenses, etc. Since he's been freed on Sirius of all that he's back to his old self again.
Another thing that many people don't seem to realize is that Stern also has the rights to all the tapes of all his old shows. That's 20+ years worth of some of the most entertaining radio content out there, and all uncensored. They've already started playing some of it, and apparently they may even set up an entire channel devoted to all this old material. If you liked him in the old days then you can listen to it all over again, and this time without the bleeps and the cuts from the dreaded "dump button".
Actually if you bothered to RTFA, it's $13 a month to access all of Sirius' music channels as well as select talk channels like Howard Stern. You get a lot more than just Howard, over 75 channels of stuff.
Frankly I'm surprised that Sirius isn't offering this subscription for less. $13/month is about what a regular radio subscription costs, and that includes access to the internet feeds. Since you can get Sirius radios for as low as $60 it'd make more sense to buy a radio and monthly subscription to get both radio & internet access instead of $13/month for just internet access.
howard stern is a no talent hack and has been for years
Care to explain how a "no talent hack" regularly had a highly rated syndicated radio show, multiple best-seller books, a movie that did reasonably well, and also highly rated television shows before being offered $500 million to go to satellite? How can a no-talent hack like me get a paycheck like that?
Because of the limited finances SCO has available they made an agreement with their lawyers to pay a fixed cost for the lawsuit. I forget exactly how much it is, but I believe it was done with the judges blessing to ensure SCO didn't suddenly lose their lawyers smack in the middle of the whole thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just talking to somebody the other day about the reliability of VOIP, cell phones, etc. in case of emergencies. I remember as a kid when Ma Bell was a monopoly here in the US. We rented our phones from them, couldn't hook up additional phones, answering machines, or any other "unauthorized" devices to our phone line. I also remember when deregulation began and suddenly we suddenly owned the phones that we had rented for so long, and got stickers from the phone company to stick on the bottom of the phones indicating that they were now ours and not theirs.
But I digress. One other thing I recall clearly is that even if there was a prolonged power failure, even one lasting multiple days, the telephones always worked. The power needed to run the entire telco system is provided from the phone company. Each central office has huge banks of lead-acid batteries and backup generators to provide electricity in the event of a power failure. You could pretty much guarantee that your phone would work for days while nothing else in your house did, a comforting thought if any emergencies arose.
Today, however, with the advent of voip, cell phones, etc. it seems like the promise of always-availble telephones is bound to disappear eventually. VOIP surely won't work if your cable modem or DSL router (or your ASUS motherboard) doesn't have any power. How will you recharge your cell phone during a power failure once you've drained its battery?
Don't get me wrong - I think all this new technology is great, but at what cost? Many people these days probably don't realize that hardwired land lines provide a reliability that all these modern gadgets can't in times of emergencies. I just wonder if the telcos will eventually give up on providing that reliability if they feel it's no longer providing a costly & desired service.
Microsoft has always claimed that the cost of a company running Windows is less than the costs involved in running F/OSS. I wonder if the pain that will undoubtedly be incurred by migrating from Windows 9x/NT/XP to Vista will convince some that it's time to give up entirely on MS products. If I were a CTO and was faced with the cost of upgrading numerous machines to Vista and retraining users on new versions of Office & Windows, I might seriously consider using those same costs to invest in migrating to a platform based on OpenOffice and a decent linux distro. Granted many larger companies most likely wouldn't consider this but I seriously wonder if more and more smaller companies might feel that this is a good reason to consider moving away from MS products. There are more and more stories out there about smaller companies dropping MS products because of the licensing costs, and with more non-US governments, etc. stating their plans to move to entirely F/OSS products it seems like the pain that MS is creating might be the tipping point for some.
If it works, don't fix it.
Yeah but that would dry up one of MS's many revenue streams!
There's probably some massive flaw with this idea that I haven't thought of? :)
Man in the middle attacks. If they can intercept the keys then they can intercept the encrypted characters and decrypt them.
That's virtually identical to what ING Direct does, which was discussed in a previous thread. The problem is that a sophisticated keylogger could also capture screenshots and mouse coordinates. From that the PIN could easily be determined.
Same here. I block ALL incoming mail traffic from China, Korea, Japan, etc. on my personal domains because of the volume of spam that originates from those countries. The remainder is fed through SpamAssassin which does a pretty darned good job of tagging likely spam and filtering out obvious spam.
You're just trolling by asking about the US, but Cuba is a valid one that I was going to question myself. At the recent UN summit on internet access, it was alleged that "Zero percent of Cubans are connected to the Internet because of the censorship hold that the authorities there have over their people.
More like this:
President Reagan: Let's help out Hussein, give him helicopters, guns, etc. to fight Iran.
President GHW Bush: Saddam is Bad. He invaded Kuwait. Kick him out. Make sure he can't do anything like that again.
President Clinton: We'll keep the sanctions, no-fly-zones, etc. in place but leave Hussein alone as long has he behaves.
President GW Bush: Let's use 9/11 to fabricate an excuse to invade Iraq and depose Hussein. It'll be a good distraction from the fact that we can't find the true terrorists who masterminded the attacks on the US.
First a troll, now a new non-sequiter-troll. And a pretty bad one at that. Your first troll was arguing that the US/Iraqi government was like Hussein for sentencing him to death. Now you not only try to steer the argument away from Hussein but from all of Iraq itself. No points for you. Try again.
So they've ordered his execution because he allegedly ordered the executions of others. Are they not then guilty of the same crime as he?
Nice troll. I'll respond anyway.
Saddam: "A few Kurds tried to assassinate me. Go bomb the Kurdish village with poison gas. Kill everybody."
US-backed Iraqi government: "You ordered the mass murder of thousands of innocent people, including women and children. You're a waste of human life. Rot in hell. Here, let us speed you on the way."
There's a bit of a difference there.
I got the same bundle, plus I think one more DVD with Julia Roberts. Forget which one though.
I think two of the four are still in their shrinkwrap 4+ years later.
In the company I worked at we started with a relatively small setup in this datacenter - about 20 cabinets. We started out with rather small growth, 10 or 20 cabinets at a time. It was slow but steady growth until there were over 500 cabinets. Since we started out small there wasn't the option (or even the issue) of doing everying in DC. I suppose if we had gone in and ordered 500 cabinets powered with DC at the very beginning that we might have gotten it, but unless your somebody like Google that's most likely not going to happen.
Wouldn't having datacenters switch over to DC power and then just using a massive battery backup system help with this?
Another comment. The vast majority of equipment in datacenters is designed to run on AC. Most companies simply buy servers from the likes of Dell, IBM, etc. which by default come with AC power supplies. Getting all the customers of a commercial datacenter to switch everything to DC would be cost prohibitive. Then there's the issue of other critical equipment like HVAC for cooling. they typically run on three-phase AC (480 volts). I have no idea if DC HVAC systems even exist.
When I worked for a big internet company who had equipment in an enterprise grade colo facility we looked into using DC since our power consumption was huge. The datacneter was already providing DC service to a telco switch housed within the facility. We would have had to have paid for the colo facility to upgrade their DC power output as well as the cost of running DC circuits from one end of the building to the other. All of that was prohibitively expensive. The bottom line was that the datacenter considered DC to be a special case for the telco and wasn't something they intended to offer to their other customers.
Wouldn't having datacenters switch over to DC power and then just using a massive battery backup system help with this? Or batteries more exspensive than having generators.
In large datacenters a battery backup system (UPS) will only last a few minutes, maybe a few hours. Generators can/will run indefinitely as long as clean fuel is available.
Any datacenter that has a generator will (should) have UPS's in any event. It takes a few seconds/minutes for generators to start up and provide full power when a power failure occurs. In a properly designed datacenter the UPS's provide short-term power to the equipment during a power failure while the generators start up automatically. Once the generators are up and running then the batteries cut out again. When power is restored the process basically reverses itself - the UPS's take the load while the generators shut down and power from the street again takes over. (Actually the generators shouldn't shut down at this point - they should recharge the UPS batteries. If steet power is lost again the UPS's and generators need to be ready to pick up the load again immediately)
Some of these dams also provide hydro-electric power
I forget where I read it but I recall something about this being one of the key reasons Google was building a huge datacenter complex in Oregon on the Columbia river. Not only does it provide cheap electricity from hydro power dams but the river also provides cooling for the datacenter.
The part that I don't undestand is this: Why do they need just one generator? If you're having difficulties obtaining a 2Mw unit, wouldn't it make sense to get two smaller units? You'd waste a bit of extra space, but you'd have redundancy that a single genearator couldn't offer.
I used to work at a company who had a lot of equipment at an MCI enterprise-grade datacenter. I forget the exact terminology but they apparently have different classes of datacenters, and this was at the top of the line. It was physically located in an area where it could tap into redundant power sources, redundant network backbones, etc. It has a total of 7 generators. Here's the Google Maps view of the datacenter. The empty field to the north is meant to house their second datacenter that they plan to build there when the first one is at capacity.
This exploit exists in IE6. It just means MS didn't fix it in IE7. It's not like it's a new exploit that was quickly discovered within the few hours after IE7 was released.
announcing Tuesday that it would give away software to enable computers to run multiple operating systems at the same time.
So now they're going to do to VMWare exactly what they did to Netscape and others?
Haven't people been saying this more or less since the end of the Iran hostage crisis back in the early 80's?
My bet is that bittorrent becomes increasingly popular in Iran to help distribute the kind of content that this crackdown is meant to discourage. True, it wouldn't necessarially help individual end-users but it'd help with overall distribution.
You don't get all of the Siruis channels online when you buy a subscription to Sirius. They only offer a few channels online - mostly music. In fact, I don't think there is a single talk channel available.
From here:
Both Stern channels
Football
Playboy (pretty lame if you ask me)
Sirius Left (liberal talk channel)
Raw Dog comedy
Maxim
BBC
and others... So there's a smattering of Sirius talk channels. Not all of them, but enough to keep you interested.
Howard is WAY past his prime, anyway. He's an interesting guy, and is even capable of the occasional intelligent insight. But the daily grind of listening to him go on...and on...and on...and on...and on about strippers/lesbians/his dick/porn stars/etc. tends to get VERY old, very fast.
Keep in mind that for the past 5 years or so on terrestrial radio he was really holding back because of more draconian FCC regulations as well as his own bosses being afraid of lawsuits, loss of their FCC licenses, etc. Since he's been freed on Sirius of all that he's back to his old self again.
Another thing that many people don't seem to realize is that Stern also has the rights to all the tapes of all his old shows. That's 20+ years worth of some of the most entertaining radio content out there, and all uncensored. They've already started playing some of it, and apparently they may even set up an entire channel devoted to all this old material. If you liked him in the old days then you can listen to it all over again, and this time without the bleeps and the cuts from the dreaded "dump button".
Actually if you bothered to RTFA, it's $13 a month to access all of Sirius' music channels as well as select talk channels like Howard Stern. You get a lot more than just Howard, over 75 channels of stuff.
Frankly I'm surprised that Sirius isn't offering this subscription for less. $13/month is about what a regular radio subscription costs, and that includes access to the internet feeds. Since you can get Sirius radios for as low as $60 it'd make more sense to buy a radio and monthly subscription to get both radio & internet access instead of $13/month for just internet access.
howard stern is a no talent hack and has been for years
Care to explain how a "no talent hack" regularly had a highly rated syndicated radio show, multiple best-seller books, a movie that did reasonably well, and also highly rated television shows before being offered $500 million to go to satellite? How can a no-talent hack like me get a paycheck like that?
Because of the limited finances SCO has available they made an agreement with their lawyers to pay a fixed cost for the lawsuit. I forget exactly how much it is, but I believe it was done with the judges blessing to ensure SCO didn't suddenly lose their lawyers smack in the middle of the whole thing.