Very interesting article. I had no idea that Japan was effectively split in half thanks to 50Hz and 60Hz power grids. So does every home that is hooked up to 50Hz have a converter to switch it to 60Hz or vice versa since some electronic devices are rather dependent on the AC frequency? What happens when somebody decides to move across the country from one power source to the other? Do you just throw out all your old clocks that relied on the AC frequency for its timing source and buy new ones?
I also wonder if the disaster unfolding there might encourage them to try to migrate the entire country to a single standard, whether 50 or 60. It has certainly demonstrated a major problem with their current infrastructure...
I also use it mainly because I use a mix of Windows, Mac, and linux systems in both my day job and at home. I like having one common browser with plug-ins that work well on each platform.
I work in an environment of literally hundreds of linux & Solaris systems, and we reboot pretty much every single one every 6 months on a regular scheduled patching cycle. We have systems broken down into groups of test/dev, staging, and production. When it's time for a new patching run we obtain all the vendor patches up to that point and apply them to the test/dev systems. After giving people a week to test & verify then we apply them to staging, and then a week or two after that during defined maintenance windows we apply them to production. If we encounter any problems along the way we address them. If we had a major problem arise along the way we'd push out the production patching until we had everything resolved on the staging systems.
This method has worked for close to 10 years at this organization and we have no intention of changing it. We control access to the production systems, and all configurations are backed up & managed via a combination of homebrew code and cfengine, along with nightly tape backups of all the production systems. If any significant problems occur on production systems then it's not all that difficult to rebuild a machine from bare metal using the saved configurations and restoring any other data from the backups.
Well receiving an SMS on your phone is somewhat like "what you have" since you need your phone to get the text. And if Google supports tokens like RSA SecurID and Verisign VIP Access fobs (or apps on smartphones) then you would be able to get more realistic two factor authentication.
FTA: "Google will call you with the code, send you an SMS message or give you the choice to generate the code for yourself using a mobile application on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device"
So what apps? Are they going to roll out their own updated Google App or are they going to support existing apps like those from RSA SecurID or Verisign VIP Access?
I access my gmail account via IMAP. I didn't see anything in that article about whether this impacts IMAP/POP or not. It's probably just for web logins, but then again you know what they say about assuming something...
I work at a university which has historically been a huge Solaris shop as far as infrastructure goes. Hundreds of web servers, mail systems, LDAP servers, etc. have all been based on Solaris for many years. But Oracle has started trying to nickle & dime us to death, so with a new push to virtualize as much of our infrastructure as we can we're also migrating as much as we can off of Solaris and onto linux. We feel like Oracle is giving us very little alternative given how much more expensive they're making things. They may keep Sun/Solaris around for a long time but from here it looks like they may not have many customers actually using it...
There are plenty of reasons to jailbreak. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of apps available through Cydia that Apple doesn't allow on their App Store for one reason or another. Many of those apps are simply not in line with the way Steve Jobs and his employees think your phone should be allowed to operate.
Case in point - an app called iBlacklist that lets you set up filters for incoming phone calls and test messages. If you block an incoming phone call you can choose to have it go straight to voicemail, get a busy signal, simply pick up & hang up, etc. Very handy if you ever get harassing phone calls from people you don't want to hear from (like sales & marketing people, etc)
Then there's RemindYou, which is an app that displays your upcoming calendar events on the screen every time you pick up your phone. Very handy for people who live by their Outlook or iCal schedules.
Nettalk adds Apple's network file sharing protocol to your iPhone, making it much easier to transfer files to/from the phone instead of having to rely on iTunes. It effectively turns your iPhone into a large thumb drive.
Those are just a couple examples of apps that many people want and find extremely useful, but Steve Jobs and Apple say you can't have. So by jailbreaking your phone you can tell Apple to bugger off and install these apps anyway.
Verizon stopped taking pre-orders in less than a day because they couldn't handle the volume. How can you claim this is a peak day of sales when it's just pre-orders? The phone isn't even available in retail stores yet, it won't be until Thursday. Just wait and see what the sales figures are after then, and in the days/weeks to follow.
Oh yeah, and the 1.4 billion number you mentioned is world-wide. Last I checked, Verizon isn't a global phone provider. If there had been 1.4 billion phones sold just in the USA then every man, woman, and child in the country would have 4.5 mobile phones. Try comparing the sales figures to just US sales and it's just a little bit more impressive.
Any competent navigator knows to treat GPS as a tool for verifying where you are. Period.
Except technology can easily fail, and even fail silently, so you need to know how to tell when something like your GPS isn't working properly and how to use something low tech like a compass since its batteries will never die.
Another quick anecdote on how technology can easily (and silently) fail - back around the time I was in Boston I heard a story on the news about a cruise ship that was sailing up the coast from Florida. Somewhere off the coast of Cape Cod it ran aground on a sandbar. The problem in that case was that their GPS wasn't working properly and was only feeding dead reckoning data to the cruise ships auto pilot. They drifted a mile or two off course by the time they got up to the Cape Cod area. The culprit in that case was a faulty antenna connection that caused the GPS to stop receiving. And yet nobody on the bridge of the cruise ship noticed the warning being displayed by the GPS...
I was in the US Coast Guard from roughly 1990 to 2000, and GPS quickly became a very popular alternative to the older LORAN-C system used by recreational & commercial boaters alike. I did a number of patrols in Boston Harbor, which has a few very shallow spots in it. There are a couple places in particular where there are rocks just below the surface of the water at low tide, but if you have even the most basic level of understanding aids to navigation (bouys, etc) it's very easy to avoid those spots. There's one spot south of Logan Airport called "lower middle" that has rocks just below the waterline, but well marked channels guide boaters well around both sides of it.
I still clearly recall one summer day when we were on patrol and saw a small boat moving slowly through lower middle, pretty much directly toward where we knew the rocks were. We sped towards them as quickly as we could and tried to get their attention, but before we could we saw the unmistakable result of their boat hitting the rocks at a slow speed - the boat lurched a bit and the back kicked up noticeably. By the time we got close enough to them without putting our own boat in danger we could see oil starting to leak out around their engine.
When we told the operator that he was well outside the marked channels and that he had struck a rock that's clearly marked on all navigation charts, he simply replied, "Well my GPS told me to turn left here."
Big freaking deal. If I live in NYC and fly to LA with a stopover in Chicago I really couldn't care less what the latest local Chicago news is or the latest local LA news is. As a resident of NY I'm much more interested in news local to NY whether I'm there or in freaking Antarctica.
I still recall it very clearly, almost like it happened only a year or two ago. I was a senior in high school at a private school up in New Hampshire, which is probably part of the reason why I recall it so well. I had a free period so I was relaxing in my room just before heading down to the cafeteria for lunch. My friend came in and told me the shuttle had blown up so we listened to the radio for a little while before going to lunch. When I got to the school cafeteria the woman serving the food apparently saw I was distressed and asked if I was ok. I mumbled that the space shuttle had blown up. She just laughed and said something like "yeah, right". I was so incensed by her reaction that I stared right back at her and practically yelled at her, "Turn on a radio if you have one around here" then went out to eat my lunch. About 15 minutes later I went back for seconds. This time when she saw me all she said was "I'm so sorry" and I could hear they had a radio on in the kitchen. Most of the rest of the afternoon most of the students were hanging out in a large auditorium where they had a projection TV running the news. The teachers pretty much let anybody stay there if they wanted rather than going to class the rest of the day.
Anybody with an ounce of technical knowhow would be able to circumvent this. A government body could easily set up a proxy server in a different country and use that to either run the crippled software or to download the uncrippled versions of the software.
Gotta love our government bureaucracy at work. Idiots.
I'm actually very satisfied knowing that NO channel of communication should be considered '100% secure'.
While it may not be 100% secure, it's not very difficult to even make things like e-mail, Instant Messengers, etc. extremely secure. All you have to do is make use of plug-in's that enable PGP, Blowfish, or other good quality encryption. As long as you use a good encryption key of sufficient length & complexity then there's virtually no way law enforcement could crack your messages. That is, of course, unless the NSA gets involved. wink wink.
Looks like virtually any other commercial datacenter I've been in. Nothing I saw these articles leads me to believe they're any different. Replace "Wall Street" with virtually any other company with an internet presence and you get the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Very interesting article. I had no idea that Japan was effectively split in half thanks to 50Hz and 60Hz power grids. So does every home that is hooked up to 50Hz have a converter to switch it to 60Hz or vice versa since some electronic devices are rather dependent on the AC frequency? What happens when somebody decides to move across the country from one power source to the other? Do you just throw out all your old clocks that relied on the AC frequency for its timing source and buy new ones? I also wonder if the disaster unfolding there might encourage them to try to migrate the entire country to a single standard, whether 50 or 60. It has certainly demonstrated a major problem with their current infrastructure...
I also use it mainly because I use a mix of Windows, Mac, and linux systems in both my day job and at home. I like having one common browser with plug-ins that work well on each platform.
I work in an environment of literally hundreds of linux & Solaris systems, and we reboot pretty much every single one every 6 months on a regular scheduled patching cycle. We have systems broken down into groups of test/dev, staging, and production. When it's time for a new patching run we obtain all the vendor patches up to that point and apply them to the test/dev systems. After giving people a week to test & verify then we apply them to staging, and then a week or two after that during defined maintenance windows we apply them to production. If we encounter any problems along the way we address them. If we had a major problem arise along the way we'd push out the production patching until we had everything resolved on the staging systems. This method has worked for close to 10 years at this organization and we have no intention of changing it. We control access to the production systems, and all configurations are backed up & managed via a combination of homebrew code and cfengine, along with nightly tape backups of all the production systems. If any significant problems occur on production systems then it's not all that difficult to rebuild a machine from bare metal using the saved configurations and restoring any other data from the backups.
does IBM even have an 8 socket intel chassis?
It looks like thier ex5 series of servers can support up to 8 sockets.
Well receiving an SMS on your phone is somewhat like "what you have" since you need your phone to get the text. And if Google supports tokens like RSA SecurID and Verisign VIP Access fobs (or apps on smartphones) then you would be able to get more realistic two factor authentication.
FTA: "Google will call you with the code, send you an SMS message or give you the choice to generate the code for yourself using a mobile application on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device"
So what apps? Are they going to roll out their own updated Google App or are they going to support existing apps like those from RSA SecurID or Verisign VIP Access?
I access my gmail account via IMAP. I didn't see anything in that article about whether this impacts IMAP/POP or not. It's probably just for web logins, but then again you know what they say about assuming something...
I work at a university which has historically been a huge Solaris shop as far as infrastructure goes. Hundreds of web servers, mail systems, LDAP servers, etc. have all been based on Solaris for many years. But Oracle has started trying to nickle & dime us to death, so with a new push to virtualize as much of our infrastructure as we can we're also migrating as much as we can off of Solaris and onto linux. We feel like Oracle is giving us very little alternative given how much more expensive they're making things. They may keep Sun/Solaris around for a long time but from here it looks like they may not have many customers actually using it...
Gurl'yy fjvgpu gb ebg39. Nsgre nyy, vg zhfg or zber frpher!
There are plenty of reasons to jailbreak. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of apps available through Cydia that Apple doesn't allow on their App Store for one reason or another. Many of those apps are simply not in line with the way Steve Jobs and his employees think your phone should be allowed to operate.
Case in point - an app called iBlacklist that lets you set up filters for incoming phone calls and test messages. If you block an incoming phone call you can choose to have it go straight to voicemail, get a busy signal, simply pick up & hang up, etc. Very handy if you ever get harassing phone calls from people you don't want to hear from (like sales & marketing people, etc)
Then there's RemindYou, which is an app that displays your upcoming calendar events on the screen every time you pick up your phone. Very handy for people who live by their Outlook or iCal schedules.
Nettalk adds Apple's network file sharing protocol to your iPhone, making it much easier to transfer files to/from the phone instead of having to rely on iTunes. It effectively turns your iPhone into a large thumb drive.
Those are just a couple examples of apps that many people want and find extremely useful, but Steve Jobs and Apple say you can't have. So by jailbreaking your phone you can tell Apple to bugger off and install these apps anyway.
Verizon stopped taking pre-orders in less than a day because they couldn't handle the volume. How can you claim this is a peak day of sales when it's just pre-orders? The phone isn't even available in retail stores yet, it won't be until Thursday. Just wait and see what the sales figures are after then, and in the days/weeks to follow.
Oh yeah, and the 1.4 billion number you mentioned is world-wide. Last I checked, Verizon isn't a global phone provider. If there had been 1.4 billion phones sold just in the USA then every man, woman, and child in the country would have 4.5 mobile phones. Try comparing the sales figures to just US sales and it's just a little bit more impressive.
Any competent navigator knows to treat GPS as a tool for verifying where you are. Period.
Except technology can easily fail, and even fail silently, so you need to know how to tell when something like your GPS isn't working properly and how to use something low tech like a compass since its batteries will never die.
Another quick anecdote on how technology can easily (and silently) fail - back around the time I was in Boston I heard a story on the news about a cruise ship that was sailing up the coast from Florida. Somewhere off the coast of Cape Cod it ran aground on a sandbar. The problem in that case was that their GPS wasn't working properly and was only feeding dead reckoning data to the cruise ships auto pilot. They drifted a mile or two off course by the time they got up to the Cape Cod area. The culprit in that case was a faulty antenna connection that caused the GPS to stop receiving. And yet nobody on the bridge of the cruise ship noticed the warning being displayed by the GPS...
Do a little research on the net and you can find updates for many GPS units available for free at sites like http://gpsunderground.com/
I was in the US Coast Guard from roughly 1990 to 2000, and GPS quickly became a very popular alternative to the older LORAN-C system used by recreational & commercial boaters alike. I did a number of patrols in Boston Harbor, which has a few very shallow spots in it. There are a couple places in particular where there are rocks just below the surface of the water at low tide, but if you have even the most basic level of understanding aids to navigation (bouys, etc) it's very easy to avoid those spots. There's one spot south of Logan Airport called "lower middle" that has rocks just below the waterline, but well marked channels guide boaters well around both sides of it.
I still clearly recall one summer day when we were on patrol and saw a small boat moving slowly through lower middle, pretty much directly toward where we knew the rocks were. We sped towards them as quickly as we could and tried to get their attention, but before we could we saw the unmistakable result of their boat hitting the rocks at a slow speed - the boat lurched a bit and the back kicked up noticeably. By the time we got close enough to them without putting our own boat in danger we could see oil starting to leak out around their engine.
When we told the operator that he was well outside the marked channels and that he had struck a rock that's clearly marked on all navigation charts, he simply replied, "Well my GPS told me to turn left here."
Big freaking deal. If I live in NYC and fly to LA with a stopover in Chicago I really couldn't care less what the latest local Chicago news is or the latest local LA news is. As a resident of NY I'm much more interested in news local to NY whether I'm there or in freaking Antarctica.
Don't put your web servers behind load balancers either, after all, the load balancer is another single point of failure.
I still recall it very clearly, almost like it happened only a year or two ago. I was a senior in high school at a private school up in New Hampshire, which is probably part of the reason why I recall it so well. I had a free period so I was relaxing in my room just before heading down to the cafeteria for lunch. My friend came in and told me the shuttle had blown up so we listened to the radio for a little while before going to lunch. When I got to the school cafeteria the woman serving the food apparently saw I was distressed and asked if I was ok. I mumbled that the space shuttle had blown up. She just laughed and said something like "yeah, right". I was so incensed by her reaction that I stared right back at her and practically yelled at her, "Turn on a radio if you have one around here" then went out to eat my lunch. About 15 minutes later I went back for seconds. This time when she saw me all she said was "I'm so sorry" and I could hear they had a radio on in the kitchen. Most of the rest of the afternoon most of the students were hanging out in a large auditorium where they had a projection TV running the news. The teachers pretty much let anybody stay there if they wanted rather than going to class the rest of the day.
Anybody with an ounce of technical knowhow would be able to circumvent this. A government body could easily set up a proxy server in a different country and use that to either run the crippled software or to download the uncrippled versions of the software. Gotta love our government bureaucracy at work. Idiots.
I'm actually very satisfied knowing that NO channel of communication should be considered '100% secure'.
While it may not be 100% secure, it's not very difficult to even make things like e-mail, Instant Messengers, etc. extremely secure. All you have to do is make use of plug-in's that enable PGP, Blowfish, or other good quality encryption. As long as you use a good encryption key of sufficient length & complexity then there's virtually no way law enforcement could crack your messages. That is, of course, unless the NSA gets involved. wink wink.
Crap.. the link broke... https://twitter.com/#!/ebertchicago/status/22676387810779136
I'd rather be called a Nigger than a Slave.
Looks like virtually any other commercial datacenter I've been in. Nothing I saw these articles leads me to believe they're any different. Replace "Wall Street" with virtually any other company with an internet presence and you get the same thing.
It was the non-stop display of smug holier-than-thou photos of Jimmy Wales and all his cronies that did it for me.
You might want to check their slush pile:
http://www.darwinawards.com/slush/new/pending20101229-052307.html
This nutjob is apparently already in the running for a Darwin Award...
http://www.darwinawards.com/slush/new/pending20101229-052307.html