The Lawyers for the ISP refusing and standing on the grounds that they as a Common Carrier are not required to keep/give this sort of info without a search warrant in a CRIMINAL case. (by the way who are they we should shine some light on them)
While ISP's are not required to keep this data, if they have it, a subpoena is the correct legal document to collect evidence or compel testimony from a third party in a civil court proceeding. If the ISP has it, and the subpoena is not quashed for other reasons (too broad, violates some other statute, whatever) then a refusing ISP would be held in contempt.
Warrants are only used or necessary in criminal cases.
That's my understanding of it. I don't know about auto auctions, because here in the US you have the lemon law that allows usually three days to return a car if it's a "lemon". That's the risk you run of an auction on eBay - someone gets it for less than you wanted to sell it for. No longer caveat emptor, but the seller too!
Just FYI, for the next time you buy a car, there is no such law in the U.S. The actual "Lemon Law" only covers new car purchases, and has nothing to do with any "3 day rule". Have you ever seen those big stickers on used car lots that say, in inch-high letters, "AS IS"? They aren't kidding.
Sellers are not allowed to actively commit fraud (i.e. say the has a new engine when it doesn't), but otherwise, once you buy it, it's yours, unless you have come to some previous agreement with the seller.
There ARE "cooling off" laws, but they only cover in-home purchases (i.e. door-to-door salesmen) and home refinancing contracts.
I've been using the exact same Logitech Trackman Marble (not even a wheel) for almost 12 years now. The thing fits my hand absolutely perfectly, and I'll keep using it until I can't get a desktop with a PS/2 mouse port anymore, and can't get coverters to work. I love this discountinued model so much, I have replaced the left button switch three times and the right switch twice to keep it alive. (All mice seem to use the exact same microswitches... a soldering iron, soldapault, some RadioShack solder, and it's as good as new.)
That mouse, and my trusty IBM Model M keyboard are the holy er... not-quite-a-trinity of input devices.
As I said in my original post, I am not saying this law is any way a good law, just that the fact that it was written by a lobbyist is not inherently evil. The article summary was written as if we should be outraged that a lobbyist wrote the law, not merely that the law was bad. (Which we already knew, and discussed when the law was passed.)
You have to remember that from twisted logic of the MPAA (or the Canadian equiv.), making an attempt to stop piracy in this fashion IS for the common good, even if Slashdot does not see it that way. Again, I'm not saying this is a good law, just that the way that the law was written is nothing to get excited about.
I have no problem with lobbying groups supplying draft legislation. It is better that legislation be written by somebody that has knowledge of the topic in question rather than a lawmaker just pulling it out of his ass. I believe that most bills affecting the private sector do come from lobbying groups of some sort.
That doesn't mean that this law was in any way useful or good (it isn't), but the fact that it was written by a lobbyist is not inherently evil. If the FSF had pushed for a bill requiring the govt. to consider Free Software for all procurement purchases over $X, I don't think Slashdot would be screaming.
Of course, that does not absolve lawmakers from their responsibility to look over any proposed legislation and suggest it be modified or tanked...
This product is not aimed at consumers at all. It is aimed at the near-line enterprise storage market. This market segment has never used CD-R's or CD-RW's for this purpose, due to their horrible unreliability and extreme slowness. This product is a replacement for Magneto-Optical jukeboxes, which were quite common for this purpose until SATA arrays took off. Given that SATA arrays keep jumping in capacity by leaps and bounds, and tapes also keep jumping in capactiy and speeds, I don't see this catching up. (1Gb/sec isn't fast at all, even right now, compared to tape, although it is speedier than SATA is today. (SAS has the potential to go a LOT faster though.)) Given that those 1Gb/sec speeds are still theoretical, AND things are already running well over a year late for the first, useless, version, I'm not holding my breath.
Oh, and HVD is still in the vaporware stage, just as this is. That makes holographic storage still quite unproven. (A brand-new radical change in technology fresh off the assembly line does not qualify as "proven".)
This product has been "Coming Soon" for a couple of years now. I think this is the third or fourth time this no-product startup has gotten an article posted on Slashdot. It is slow (180Mb/s is in no way "fast), under-capacity (600GB is a waste of time), overpriced, and unproven. If you want near-line storage, use SATA, if you want archival, use tape. I don't see much of a market for this thing.
150,000 would more-or-less be IBM's entire U.S. workforce, not 40% of it. If Cringely can't even get that right, I'd treat the rest of the article as extremely suspect.
The IBM press release mentioned nothing about open source, other than to mention that open source envrionments (in this case, referring to Linux) worked with the announced offering. (The only other occurances of the word "Open Source" in the article refer to the VP's job title.) It did not claim that the offering was open source. The use of the term "open" (as used here) to refer to products that will run on multiple operating environments is not new, and substantially pre-dates the term "open source".
IBM is simply announcing a client offering that will run more-or-less identically on multiple OS platforms. No, this isn't very big news, but it isn't as bad as the article author made it out to be.
If you receive "real-world" income for your MMO loot (i.e. eBay), than of COURSE that is taxable income, just as much as tips for juggling on a street corner are taxable income. If you never get money for the loot, and the trading of loot for eventual real-world income is not a business of yours, then it is not taxable.
For example:
Not taxable: I kill a Super-Mega-Nasty-Dragon and loot the epic Item Sword-of-Greatest-Butt-Kicking. I use it to slay more vitual things, and eventually get bored and let my account lapse, I have no taxable income. Since the TOS doesn't actually allow the sale of virtual items on eBay, my item theoretically has no value, and I have received no money for the worthless item. This is no different from (from a tax perspective) from taking a $5.00 canvas, $1.00 of paint, and making a masterpiece worth millions, but hanging it up in your living room until it falls apart.
Taxable: I kill the aforementioned Dragon and sell the sword on eBay. I have now sold something and received money for it. It now has a value (because I sold it), and that income is taxable, but I could possibly deduct my monthly payment, bandwidth bills, etc., according to the normal (extremely complicated) rules for deducting business expenses. Even if though the item is not physically tangible, you have essentially performed a service for somebody (by obtaining the item so they didn't have to), and they have paid you real money for it. (Similar example: You sell 500 copies of "eBay loot-selling secrets" for $5 each. The item consists of nothing more than a.pdf file, but you have received money for it. The sale of the items are most certainly taxable.)
Maybe taxable: I buy the sword off of eBay, and trade the sword with somebody else for an item that goes for more money on eBay. Is that taxable? Maybe. If you make a business off of selling items on eBay, it just might be. Barter is just as taxable as cash transactions. (Although harder to compute.) If you are just a player executing a trade for something nicer, and don't sell stuff for cash, I'm going to have to say that it probably is not taxable. You are trading an intangible item with somebody else. You never receive cash money for it (or any other item), it isn't a tangible object, I don't see the income.
The IRS will eventually have to write rules on this for the "Maybe", but I don't think they will affect the vast majority of players. No cash money for items, no taxable income, and almost everybody lives happily ever after.
Really there are two different kinds of programming in the world, of which Mr. Allison only regularly traffics in one.
A small minority of programmers do things like write Operating Systems, Protocol Stacks, Embedded Systems, or ever have to give a flying fig about the POSIX spec. (Or the Windows counterpart, for that matter.) These people are well served by CsC degrees, a fondness for algorithms, CPU Arch. knowledge, a current IEEE membership, etc.
This is the sort of code created by what is generally referred to by the "tech industry". It is a pretty fair-sized industry, but is dwarfed by...
Corporate IT programming. The gigantic majority of code used in this world is not written by technology companies. It is written by folks working in corporate IT departments, small application shops, etc. These are folks that toil day in and day out in DB languages, VB, COBOL, the AJAX and LAMP stacks, etc. These folks really don't need to spend a great deal of time learning basic principles, because processor architecture really isn't relevant to SQL or LAMP. These folks can get by with a Community College degree where they will either learn to program properly, or not.
Both kinds of programmers can show great passion for work, both kinds can turn out really great code, or really pathetic code. The world certainly has need for both kinds or programmer, but tends to use a LOT more of the second. Look at job listings... how many openings are there for SQL, AJAX, COBOL, etc. gurus, vs. Low-level OS programmers?
Some of Mr. Allison's advice applies to both kinds of programmer. Certainly your resume will never be hurt by contributing to community-based projects, but learning the language-of-the-week can be far more lucrative skill for an IT programmer than burning time learning about processor registers.
For the record, I work in support, not development, but I work at a level low enough that I would be closer to the first kind of programmer, not the second. I eat bit-wise protocol traces for breakfast, chew on ANSI standards for lunch, and end the day with a hearty meal of high-speed network topologies capped with dessert of an IEEE journal or two.
1) No, it isn't your Fibre cards. The PCI-whatever bus (or the line speed of the card, for that matter), usually only affect high-bandwidth operations like tape backup. One thing you must remember is that loads that can beat the crap out of disk (random operations spread all over the platters), do not affect the I/O bus of the Fibre adapters at all, which cares only about total throughput. 2) It is far more likely your OS needs defragging than your disk array. Your disk array CAN become fragmented if you add and delete LUNs often, though. 3) Yes, you need multiple fibre cards, but for redundancy, not for bandwidth. 4) Try and put your major workloads on their own RAID arrays on your disk controller. 5) Check to see if you have enough memory in those boxes. If you have one server that keeps swapping out to disk and you are booting from SAN, you are going to get very hosed, very quickly. If these boxes have any internal disk at all, put the swap there. 6) If it is possible with your arrays, max out the segment size. (Engenio/LSI - based arrays can do this.)
Some little dinky departmental servers can get by with NAS and/or FTP backup. But when you need to backup a few TB every single night, FTP starts to become very rediculous, very quickly.
Yes, for low-end backup of relatively small amounts of data, tape makes no sense. Quality drives cost a fortune, and keeping track of what is on which tape is a real pain for just a few total TB.
But for many users of modern tape, a backup solution with a total capacity of just few TB is a mere rounding error. Heck, modern tapes can usually store 1.5 to 2 TB per tape. (Depends on compressiblity, which is done by the drive itself.) It is not uncommon to see a libary full of a few dozen drives and several hundred of those tapes. (This bloat is largely due to expanded archival requirements, and the current regulatory environment.)
And yes, tape is quite reliable, and has been reliable for decades. Yeah, if you try and archive on some consumer-quality QIC/Travan floppy-tape piece of crap, you are gonna lose data. (This is why nobody sells tape drives to consumers anymore.) But enterprise tape is a different animal altogether, and is far more reliable long-term than hard drives. (Especially for off-site long-term archival.) I have customers that still read reel-to-reel tapes, even today.
This is a big problem with Linux, and no amount of wishful thinking will make the problem go away. Apps not working on all distributions is exactly the sort of problem that the Linux Standards Base (went nowhere) and United Linux (supported by Caldera/SCO) were supposed to prevent.
Yer, and that's where effort needs to go - no on relying on certification
I am very sure that SW vendors would love to not have to test/certify apps on individual distros. It's expensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and a real Pain In The Butt. but what exactly are they supposed to do until all Linux distros conform to some comprehensive standard? (This will never happen, because somebody will always find a "better" way to do things.)
Maybe some IT shop that doesn't care about their software actually working can do that, but actual software companies that make their living selling software MUST perform testing.
Errrrr, whereabouts did I say that testing wasn't peformed? The point is, relying on certification here gets you nowhere, as you've actually admitted, otherwise testing wouldn't be necessary;-).
You said "Organisations generally just try it out on a newer version of an OS, and if it works OK in a trial period (even if they have to tweak things to get it to work) they go with it, and they don't fly into a massive panic." That's not testing, at least not testing I'm going to let any vendor get away with.
Certification IS useful, and is the end-product of a quality testing process. The idea is that customers hold off implementing software on uncertified distros until the SW vendor has verified that it will actually work. Certification is VERY useful, as distro quirks can be found in a vendor test lab before they are found the hard way by a customer. (That isn't to say that certification is flawless, but it is better than a free-for-all.)
Yes, there are many organizations that do that, but those are either small and/or low-quality IT shops and/or non-critical apps.
Errrrr, no. Many organisations big and small don't fly into a panic when something isn't certified - it depends on if it works. See testing comment above. With Linux systems, very little can work easily between them, and people even have an easier time installing open source software on a Windows system.
Whether or not "it works" is something most organizations rely on their software vendor to tell them, at least vendors that they are paying large amounts of maintenance dollars to. It is not a good strategy to render your expensive maint. contract worthless because you start running in an unsupported environment. When something very important like your primary inventory and invoice DB fails suddenly, you most certainly do panic when you call your DB vendor and they tell you "RHEL Vfoo.bar has not been certified yet because of nasty issues. Looks like you found one. Call back when you have backleveled."
The fact of the matter is that there ARE differences between distributions, and those differences have been known to break a lot of applications.
Making that statement doesn't solve the problem.
This statement was merely a response to your statement: "I just hate the whole concept of Linux distribution certification, because it tells me that there's something wrong with running software on it." There IS something wrong with running software on "Linux" because the free-for-all huge pile of distros means there is no such thing as "Linux", at least not in a fashion useful to a vendor of complex software. Stating that you don't like that doesn't make the problem go away either.
If you certified your mega-dollar application to run on any Linux distro, what do you do the first time some clown calls up with some home-grown hybrid of five different distros and wonders why it doesn't work?
Now I'm at the point where I'm studying for my CCNA, and a wonderful thing is happening. The more I am learning about the underlying technologies that make networks work, the more everything i know makes sense. Why things are done the way they are.
No disrespect to the career path you have chosen, but your statement there is exactly why people go to college to begin with. The whole point of college (done correctly) is to teach you those things. Had you gone that route, the jobs you have now are the sorts that you could be offered right out of school without much difficulty. (That said, if you treat college like a trade school, then that is exactly what you end up with. You have to go about it correctly to get offered anything better than crap jobs and you will have wasted an awful lot of money and have a miserable time.)
My very first job right out of school was doing top-level router support for 50k/yr (this was seven years ago, and things have only gone up since then), despite never having seen a router before in my life. OSPF makes a LOT more sense (and is much easier to pick up) if you have taken a class in communications theory and have received the general math and Engineering background every college gives you.
The advantage to the "Engineering state of mind" that a quality Engineering degree provides is that I could completely change my line of work tomorrow, and be fairly good at it (and be well paid); Say from networking HW support to computer storage performance tuning.
Now that you have been "in the trenches" a while, you might want to look for an employer that will offer tuition re-imbursement to go back to school. Lots of colleges now have degree programs for "non-traditional" students and you will probably find college a lot more interesting and useful now that you have some more "life experience" under your belt. You will likely discover that the things you do magically make a lot more sense (and will be easier) even if you don't take a single class directly applicable to your job. No, going that route won't be easy. It is tough to hold a full-time job and get a degree at the same time, but you may very well find the rewards to be well worth it. If you can get through the frosh Engineering "weed-outs" (usually Calc and/or Physics), you should do fine. (I know Calc was almost my downfall... I got a "D" in Calc 1. It was only b/c my frosh advisor didn't know what he was doing that they even let me take Calc 2 without repeating 1.)
The sort of things you learn by the end of your degree are things that simply cannot be picked up no matter how many O'Reilly's you read or vendor certs you have hanging up in your cube...
All that being said, college is certainly not for everyone, and there is nothing wrong with staying with the "in the trenches" route.
SirWired
P.S. "Computer Networks" by Tannenbaum (the Minux guy) is an excellent general college-level textbook on networking. (It was the book I read to prepare me for my job interview with a networking equipment vendor.) Favorite quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." Reminding customers of that one has saved my clients a LOT of money and heartache over the years. Also, "OSPF: Anatomy of an Internet Routing Protocol" by Moy is the way to go to understand how IP routing REALLY works. It's like the RFCs for RIP and OSPF, only in English. Lastly, "Soul of a New Machine" by Kidder makes just about everything technical seem less pointlessly insane/stupid. (Things still seem stupid, but you'll understand why after reading that one.) (That book is thanks to my Engineering and Society class.)
I just hate the whole concept of Linux distribution certification, because it tells me that there's something wrong with running software on it.
For most IT dept.-written apps that rely on super-common well-known library functions, no, the distribution doesn't make much of a difference. But once you start doing lower-level stuff (like the sort of stuff every software application IBM sells does), things start to not work right.
This is a big problem with Linux, and no amount of wishful thinking will make the problem go away. Apps not working on all distributions is exactly the sort of problem that the Linux Standards Base (went nowhere) and United Linux (supported by Caldera/SCO) were supposed to prevent.
Organisations generally just try it out on a newer version of an OS, and if it works OK in a trial period (even if they have to tweak things to get it to work) they go with it, and they don't fly into a massive panic.
Maybe some IT shop that doesn't care about their software actually working can do that, but actual software companies that make their living selling software MUST perform testing.
Yes, there are many organizations that do that, but those are either small and/or low-quality IT shops and/or non-critical apps.
I have several healthcare industry customers that are running OS software that is coming up on three years of ageing out of OS vendor support because their app vendor STILL hasn't certified a more recent O/S version. For them, and most customers, the app vendor support is far more important than OS vendor support, because they know that most day-to-day bugs are in their apps, not their OS. Personally, I know that I crash Mozilla (and other apps) a heck of a lot more than I have ever crashed Windows.
If Oracle can say "Yes, this will run" to their customers, and their customers try it out and it does actually run, then no one will care.
Those customers will care very much when they try and call IBM to receive assistance under their support contract for their expensive and complex application and IBM says "Sorry Mr. Customer, you are running in an extremely unsupported and untested environment." Usually this will be accompanied by some limited best-effort support to make sure that it is not an obvious bug in the product.
Now if enough customers ask for it (and are willing to pay), I am sure that IBM will be more than happy to certify their apps on Oracle Linux. Yes, Oracle is a competitor, but so is M$, and plenty of IBM software runs on Windows. But IBM is not going to go out and certify Oracle Linux just because Oracle is whining about it. I am equally sure that if IBM rolled out their own distro tomorrow, Oracle would not be falling over themselves to certify their apps for it either.
This whole concept of distributors and software vendors protecting themselves (and engineering some lock-in, incidentally) by certifying, or certifying for, certain distributions just isn't helping Linux or open source software get more widely used.
The fact of the matter is that there ARE differences between distributions, and those differences have been known to break a lot of applications. Because of this, there is no way for a software vendor to get around distribution certification. If you certified your mega-dollar application to run on any Linux distro, what do you do the first time some clown calls up with some home-grown hybrid of five different distros and wonders why it doesn't work?
Software companies are in the business of making money, not "helping Linux or open source software get more widely used." If Linux distro writers want to make the burden of application certification easier, then the onus is on the Linux folks to get their act together and make Linux distros more homogenous. Don't blame the software vendors for this sorry state of affairs.
One thing you are overlooking is that those numbers are the sum for the entire UK law enforcement apparatus, not just terrorism-related investigations. No conclusions can be drawn from those numbers as to how useful the requests have been.
Since you're complaining about someone pulling numbers out of their ass, care to share the basis of your "incorrect and sensationalist" judgment?
Where in the article does it break down the 439k by type of requests?
Sure, I'd be happy to:
Your first hint should be this statement in the article: nearly 4,000 errors were reported in a 15-month period from 2005 to 2006. While most appeared to concern "lower-level data" such as requests for telephone lists and individual e-mail addresses, 67 were mistakes concerning direct interception of communications.
This means that approx. 3900 of the errors made in the requests were NOT for actual communication interception. We can guess from that alone that the majority of the requests are not for taps, but for the sort of information that one would obtain in the U.S. in a subpeona.(sp?) or National Security Letter. That alone makes the headline a likely extremely incorrect statement.
If you actual trawl the web for the report, you won't find it, (or, at least I can't), but looking at the original article and looking at older reports, we can draw some conclusions.
The article states that warrants are only necessary for actual communication interception. If we look at the 2004 report from this guy, we can see in the appendix that in 2004, there were only 1849 warrants issued. (And there were 45 errors reported with those interceptions.) I sincerely doubt that the requests for taps have incresed by over two orders of magnitude in two years. The manpower issues alone associated with such a thing would be staggering.
There were NOT 439,000 requests to tap phones. There were 439,000 requests for "communications information". This includes requests for lists of e-mail addresses, lists of numbers called, etc, in addition to taps.
I'm not saying that is a good or bad thing, just that the headline is incorrect and sensationalist.
When that Wallace a$$hole decided that the GPL/Linux was destroying the market for for-pay OS'es by giving them away, he was completely laughed off of Slashdot, and the courts also.
But now some tool says that IBM is destroying the market for for-pay IDE's and DB's by giving them away, and actually gets an article posted on Slashdot as serious grounds for discussion.
Please explain to me how that works.
As the descision in Wallace pointed out, giving something away where you have absolutely no way to raise the price later is not illegal, or even immoral, predatory behavior. Anti-trust law is designed and intended to protect consumers, not necessarily competitors.
Just like DVD, most people's first DVD player was a PS2.
Where on earth did you come up with THAT? The PS2 was a good-selling console, but it didn't sell THAT well. According to the SanJose Mercury News, lifetime sales for the PS2 in the U.S., as of the end of 2006, was 37.1 million. According to Nielsen, DVD currently has 80% market penetration, and there are approx. 113M U.S. households. (according to the Census), meaning that 90.4M U.S. households have a DVD player. An unknown number of those may have purchased a PS2 AFTER they bought a DVD player. (That was the case in my house.)
Maybe for the households that bought a PS2, it is possible (but not certain) that "most" of them had it as their first player, but that does not translate to the U.S. market overall.
Let's just say that I won't be investing my life savings into some MMORPG anytime soon. Unless the universe is STRICTLY limited so that actual cash dollars MUST come in (either through monthly fees or deposits) before money is created (including money "created" by NPC's), this will likely crash 'n burn.
The entirely expected, and disturbing part of the "Cash Card" user agreement is as follows:
"MindArk may, at MindArk's sole discretion refuse a request for authorization of any Entropia Universe Cash Card transaction or may deactivate the Entropia Universe Cash Card without notice and may notify third parties of such refusal or deactivation as MindArk determines is necessary." The Cash Card is one of the ways you get money out of the system (via ATM's), so if it gets deactivated, that hurts. While I wasn't able to find any information on it, I suspect the direct bank-transfer system has a similar caveat.
This whole setup reminds me of "Stock Generation", an online Ponzi scheme set up as a "game" several years ago. Google can probably dig up details.
Yes, the condenser sits outside the building. However the "condensing" in the word "condensor" refers to the condensing of the refrigerant under pressure within the outdoor refrigerant tubing, not the condensing of water on the coils. Water condensation occurs on the evaporator coils. (The Evaporation referred to in the name refers to the evaporation of the refrigerant within the evaporator coils once it passes through the restrictive orifice.) The evaporator is usually located inside the building, or in the case of a data center, on the raised floor itself.
This is the case even with a standard home split A/C, which has a drain coming out of the cabinet where the indoor coils reside to drain off evap condensate.
Before you insult other posters, please obtain a clue first.
Okay, if Mr. Evans is such a bogus authority on tax law, why do tax protestors keep LOSING with the same bogus crap year after year? If you go to court with the arguments in that web page, you WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY LOSE. Period. End of story.
Tax Protestor arguments are based on a tortured reading of the law and various court decisions over the year. Essentially, they come down to: "Because of the way the law is written, the income tax is mostly uncollectable, but it is only through the government's incorrect reading of the law that tax is collected."
For Tax Protestor arguments to be correct, one of the following MUST be true:
A) The law is unambiguous, and the income tax, as currently enforced by the Internal Revenue Service, is more-or-less illegal.
If this were true, then I think thousands of judges across the land (who have ACTUAL legal training, experience, and expertise) would have reached the same conclusion by now, and Tax Protestor cases would be a lot more successful than they are. Either that, or there is some huge conspiracy by thousands of judges over the years to side with the governemnt to enforce the Internal Revenue Code incorrectly. If you believe that, any futher argument is futile, since it is impossible to argue with a conspriacy theorist.
B) The law is ambiguous, and the court's (and IRS's) interpretation of the law is more-or-less incorrect.
In cases where a law is ambiguous, the courts refer to "congressional intent" to try and figure out what Congress had in mind when it passed a law that is insufficiently precise. (The courts cannot simply declare all imprecise laws invalid, or there wouldn't be many laws left.) If courts have been mis-interpreting Congressional intent all these years and Congress did not mean to have the income tax enforced in more-or-less the way it is now, they would have passed a law by now clearing up their intent.
Slashdot Mirror
The Lawyers for the ISP refusing and standing on the grounds that they as a Common Carrier are not required to keep/give this sort of info without a search warrant in a CRIMINAL case. (by the way who are they we should shine some light on them)
While ISP's are not required to keep this data, if they have it, a subpoena is the correct legal document to collect evidence or compel testimony from a third party in a civil court proceeding. If the ISP has it, and the subpoena is not quashed for other reasons (too broad, violates some other statute, whatever) then a refusing ISP would be held in contempt.
Warrants are only used or necessary in criminal cases.
SirWired
I stand corrected.
SirWired
That's my understanding of it. I don't know about auto auctions, because here in the US you have the lemon law that allows usually three days to return a car if it's a "lemon". That's the risk you run of an auction on eBay - someone gets it for less than you wanted to sell it for. No longer caveat emptor, but the seller too!
Just FYI, for the next time you buy a car, there is no such law in the U.S. The actual "Lemon Law" only covers new car purchases, and has nothing to do with any "3 day rule". Have you ever seen those big stickers on used car lots that say, in inch-high letters, "AS IS"? They aren't kidding.
Sellers are not allowed to actively commit fraud (i.e. say the has a new engine when it doesn't), but otherwise, once you buy it, it's yours, unless you have come to some previous agreement with the seller.
There ARE "cooling off" laws, but they only cover in-home purchases (i.e. door-to-door salesmen) and home refinancing contracts.
SirWired
I've been using the exact same Logitech Trackman Marble (not even a wheel) for almost 12 years now. The thing fits my hand absolutely perfectly, and I'll keep using it until I can't get a desktop with a PS/2 mouse port anymore, and can't get coverters to work. I love this discountinued model so much, I have replaced the left button switch three times and the right switch twice to keep it alive. (All mice seem to use the exact same microswitches... a soldering iron, soldapault, some RadioShack solder, and it's as good as new.)
That mouse, and my trusty IBM Model M keyboard are the holy er... not-quite-a-trinity of input devices.
SirWired
As I said in my original post, I am not saying this law is any way a good law, just that the fact that it was written by a lobbyist is not inherently evil. The article summary was written as if we should be outraged that a lobbyist wrote the law, not merely that the law was bad. (Which we already knew, and discussed when the law was passed.)
You have to remember that from twisted logic of the MPAA (or the Canadian equiv.), making an attempt to stop piracy in this fashion IS for the common good, even if Slashdot does not see it that way. Again, I'm not saying this is a good law, just that the way that the law was written is nothing to get excited about.
SirWired
I have no problem with lobbying groups supplying draft legislation. It is better that legislation be written by somebody that has knowledge of the topic in question rather than a lawmaker just pulling it out of his ass. I believe that most bills affecting the private sector do come from lobbying groups of some sort.
That doesn't mean that this law was in any way useful or good (it isn't), but the fact that it was written by a lobbyist is not inherently evil. If the FSF had pushed for a bill requiring the govt. to consider Free Software for all procurement purchases over $X, I don't think Slashdot would be screaming.
Of course, that does not absolve lawmakers from their responsibility to look over any proposed legislation and suggest it be modified or tanked...
SirWired
This product is not aimed at consumers at all. It is aimed at the near-line enterprise storage market. This market segment has never used CD-R's or CD-RW's for this purpose, due to their horrible unreliability and extreme slowness. This product is a replacement for Magneto-Optical jukeboxes, which were quite common for this purpose until SATA arrays took off. Given that SATA arrays keep jumping in capacity by leaps and bounds, and tapes also keep jumping in capactiy and speeds, I don't see this catching up. (1Gb/sec isn't fast at all, even right now, compared to tape, although it is speedier than SATA is today. (SAS has the potential to go a LOT faster though.)) Given that those 1Gb/sec speeds are still theoretical, AND things are already running well over a year late for the first, useless, version, I'm not holding my breath.
Oh, and HVD is still in the vaporware stage, just as this is. That makes holographic storage still quite unproven. (A brand-new radical change in technology fresh off the assembly line does not qualify as "proven".)
SirWired
This product has been "Coming Soon" for a couple of years now. I think this is the third or fourth time this no-product startup has gotten an article posted on Slashdot. It is slow (180Mb/s is in no way "fast), under-capacity (600GB is a waste of time), overpriced, and unproven. If you want near-line storage, use SATA, if you want archival, use tape. I don't see much of a market for this thing.
SirWired
150,000 would more-or-less be IBM's entire U.S. workforce, not 40% of it. If Cringely can't even get that right, I'd treat the rest of the article as extremely suspect.
SirWired
The IBM press release mentioned nothing about open source, other than to mention that open source envrionments (in this case, referring to Linux) worked with the announced offering. (The only other occurances of the word "Open Source" in the article refer to the VP's job title.) It did not claim that the offering was open source. The use of the term "open" (as used here) to refer to products that will run on multiple operating environments is not new, and substantially pre-dates the term "open source".
IBM is simply announcing a client offering that will run more-or-less identically on multiple OS platforms. No, this isn't very big news, but it isn't as bad as the article author made it out to be.
SirWired
If you receive "real-world" income for your MMO loot (i.e. eBay), than of COURSE that is taxable income, just as much as tips for juggling on a street corner are taxable income. If you never get money for the loot, and the trading of loot for eventual real-world income is not a business of yours, then it is not taxable.
.pdf file, but you have received money for it. The sale of the items are most certainly taxable.)
For example:
Not taxable: I kill a Super-Mega-Nasty-Dragon and loot the epic Item Sword-of-Greatest-Butt-Kicking. I use it to slay more vitual things, and eventually get bored and let my account lapse, I have no taxable income. Since the TOS doesn't actually allow the sale of virtual items on eBay, my item theoretically has no value, and I have received no money for the worthless item. This is no different from (from a tax perspective) from taking a $5.00 canvas, $1.00 of paint, and making a masterpiece worth millions, but hanging it up in your living room until it falls apart.
Taxable: I kill the aforementioned Dragon and sell the sword on eBay. I have now sold something and received money for it. It now has a value (because I sold it), and that income is taxable, but I could possibly deduct my monthly payment, bandwidth bills, etc., according to the normal (extremely complicated) rules for deducting business expenses. Even if though the item is not physically tangible, you have essentially performed a service for somebody (by obtaining the item so they didn't have to), and they have paid you real money for it. (Similar example: You sell 500 copies of "eBay loot-selling secrets" for $5 each. The item consists of nothing more than a
Maybe taxable: I buy the sword off of eBay, and trade the sword with somebody else for an item that goes for more money on eBay. Is that taxable? Maybe. If you make a business off of selling items on eBay, it just might be. Barter is just as taxable as cash transactions. (Although harder to compute.) If you are just a player executing a trade for something nicer, and don't sell stuff for cash, I'm going to have to say that it probably is not taxable. You are trading an intangible item with somebody else. You never receive cash money for it (or any other item), it isn't a tangible object, I don't see the income.
The IRS will eventually have to write rules on this for the "Maybe", but I don't think they will affect the vast majority of players. No cash money for items, no taxable income, and almost everybody lives happily ever after.
SirWired
Really there are two different kinds of programming in the world, of which Mr. Allison only regularly traffics in one.
A small minority of programmers do things like write Operating Systems, Protocol Stacks, Embedded Systems, or ever have to give a flying fig about the POSIX spec. (Or the Windows counterpart, for that matter.) These people are well served by CsC degrees, a fondness for algorithms, CPU Arch. knowledge, a current IEEE membership, etc.
This is the sort of code created by what is generally referred to by the "tech industry". It is a pretty fair-sized industry, but is dwarfed by...
Corporate IT programming. The gigantic majority of code used in this world is not written by technology companies. It is written by folks working in corporate IT departments, small application shops, etc. These are folks that toil day in and day out in DB languages, VB, COBOL, the AJAX and LAMP stacks, etc. These folks really don't need to spend a great deal of time learning basic principles, because processor architecture really isn't relevant to SQL or LAMP. These folks can get by with a Community College degree where they will either learn to program properly, or not.
Both kinds of programmers can show great passion for work, both kinds can turn out really great code, or really pathetic code. The world certainly has need for both kinds or programmer, but tends to use a LOT more of the second. Look at job listings... how many openings are there for SQL, AJAX, COBOL, etc. gurus, vs. Low-level OS programmers?
Some of Mr. Allison's advice applies to both kinds of programmer. Certainly your resume will never be hurt by contributing to community-based projects, but learning the language-of-the-week can be far more lucrative skill for an IT programmer than burning time learning about processor registers.
For the record, I work in support, not development, but I work at a level low enough that I would be closer to the first kind of programmer, not the second. I eat bit-wise protocol traces for breakfast, chew on ANSI standards for lunch, and end the day with a hearty meal of high-speed network topologies capped with dessert of an IEEE journal or two.
SirWired
1) No, it isn't your Fibre cards. The PCI-whatever bus (or the line speed of the card, for that matter), usually only affect high-bandwidth operations like tape backup. One thing you must remember is that loads that can beat the crap out of disk (random operations spread all over the platters), do not affect the I/O bus of the Fibre adapters at all, which cares only about total throughput.
2) It is far more likely your OS needs defragging than your disk array. Your disk array CAN become fragmented if you add and delete LUNs often, though.
3) Yes, you need multiple fibre cards, but for redundancy, not for bandwidth.
4) Try and put your major workloads on their own RAID arrays on your disk controller.
5) Check to see if you have enough memory in those boxes. If you have one server that keeps swapping out to disk and you are booting from SAN, you are going to get very hosed, very quickly. If these boxes have any internal disk at all, put the swap there.
6) If it is possible with your arrays, max out the segment size. (Engenio/LSI - based arrays can do this.)
This should be enough to get you started.
SirWired
Some little dinky departmental servers can get by with NAS and/or FTP backup. But when you need to backup a few TB every single night, FTP starts to become very rediculous, very quickly.
Yes, for low-end backup of relatively small amounts of data, tape makes no sense. Quality drives cost a fortune, and keeping track of what is on which tape is a real pain for just a few total TB.
But for many users of modern tape, a backup solution with a total capacity of just few TB is a mere rounding error. Heck, modern tapes can usually store 1.5 to 2 TB per tape. (Depends on compressiblity, which is done by the drive itself.) It is not uncommon to see a libary full of a few dozen drives and several hundred of those tapes. (This bloat is largely due to expanded archival requirements, and the current regulatory environment.)
And yes, tape is quite reliable, and has been reliable for decades. Yeah, if you try and archive on some consumer-quality QIC/Travan floppy-tape piece of crap, you are gonna lose data. (This is why nobody sells tape drives to consumers anymore.) But enterprise tape is a different animal altogether, and is far more reliable long-term than hard drives. (Especially for off-site long-term archival.) I have customers that still read reel-to-reel tapes, even today.
SirWired
This is a big problem with Linux, and no amount of wishful thinking will make the problem go away. Apps not working on all distributions is exactly the sort of problem that the Linux Standards Base (went nowhere) and United Linux (supported by Caldera/SCO) were supposed to prevent.
Yer, and that's where effort needs to go - no on relying on certification
I am very sure that SW vendors would love to not have to test/certify apps on individual distros. It's expensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and a real Pain In The Butt. but what exactly are they supposed to do until all Linux distros conform to some comprehensive standard? (This will never happen, because somebody will always find a "better" way to do things.)
Maybe some IT shop that doesn't care about their software actually working can do that, but actual software companies that make their living selling software MUST perform testing.
;-).
Errrrr, whereabouts did I say that testing wasn't peformed? The point is, relying on certification here gets you nowhere, as you've actually admitted, otherwise testing wouldn't be necessary
You said "Organisations generally just try it out on a newer version of an OS, and if it works OK in a trial period (even if they have to tweak things to get it to work) they go with it, and they don't fly into a massive panic." That's not testing, at least not testing I'm going to let any vendor get away with.
Certification IS useful, and is the end-product of a quality testing process. The idea is that customers hold off implementing software on uncertified distros until the SW vendor has verified that it will actually work. Certification is VERY useful, as distro quirks can be found in a vendor test lab before they are found the hard way by a customer. (That isn't to say that certification is flawless, but it is better than a free-for-all.)
Yes, there are many organizations that do that, but those are either small and/or low-quality IT shops and/or non-critical apps.
Errrrr, no. Many organisations big and small don't fly into a panic when something isn't certified - it depends on if it works. See testing comment above. With Linux systems, very little can work easily between them, and people even have an easier time installing open source software on a Windows system.
Whether or not "it works" is something most organizations rely on their software vendor to tell them, at least vendors that they are paying large amounts of maintenance dollars to. It is not a good strategy to render your expensive maint. contract worthless because you start running in an unsupported environment. When something very important like your primary inventory and invoice DB fails suddenly, you most certainly do panic when you call your DB vendor and they tell you "RHEL Vfoo.bar has not been certified yet because of nasty issues. Looks like you found one. Call back when you have backleveled."
The fact of the matter is that there ARE differences between distributions, and those differences have been known to break a lot of applications.
Making that statement doesn't solve the problem.
This statement was merely a response to your statement: "I just hate the whole concept of Linux distribution certification, because it tells me that there's something wrong with running software on it." There IS something wrong with running software on "Linux" because the free-for-all huge pile of distros means there is no such thing as "Linux", at least not in a fashion useful to a vendor of complex software. Stating that you don't like that doesn't make the problem go away either.
If you certified your mega-dollar application to run on any Linux distro, what do you do the first time some clown calls up with some home-grown hybrid of five different distros and wonders why it doesn't work?
Contribute to the LSB an
Now I'm at the point where I'm studying for my CCNA, and a wonderful thing is happening. The more I am learning about the underlying technologies that make networks work, the more everything i know makes sense. Why things are done the way they are.
No disrespect to the career path you have chosen, but your statement there is exactly why people go to college to begin with. The whole point of college (done correctly) is to teach you those things. Had you gone that route, the jobs you have now are the sorts that you could be offered right out of school without much difficulty. (That said, if you treat college like a trade school, then that is exactly what you end up with. You have to go about it correctly to get offered anything better than crap jobs and you will have wasted an awful lot of money and have a miserable time.)
My very first job right out of school was doing top-level router support for 50k/yr (this was seven years ago, and things have only gone up since then), despite never having seen a router before in my life. OSPF makes a LOT more sense (and is much easier to pick up) if you have taken a class in communications theory and have received the general math and Engineering background every college gives you.
The advantage to the "Engineering state of mind" that a quality Engineering degree provides is that I could completely change my line of work tomorrow, and be fairly good at it (and be well paid); Say from networking HW support to computer storage performance tuning.
Now that you have been "in the trenches" a while, you might want to look for an employer that will offer tuition re-imbursement to go back to school. Lots of colleges now have degree programs for "non-traditional" students and you will probably find college a lot more interesting and useful now that you have some more "life experience" under your belt. You will likely discover that the things you do magically make a lot more sense (and will be easier) even if you don't take a single class directly applicable to your job. No, going that route won't be easy. It is tough to hold a full-time job and get a degree at the same time, but you may very well find the rewards to be well worth it. If you can get through the frosh Engineering "weed-outs" (usually Calc and/or Physics), you should do fine. (I know Calc was almost my downfall... I got a "D" in Calc 1. It was only b/c my frosh advisor didn't know what he was doing that they even let me take Calc 2 without repeating 1.)
The sort of things you learn by the end of your degree are things that simply cannot be picked up no matter how many O'Reilly's you read or vendor certs you have hanging up in your cube...
All that being said, college is certainly not for everyone, and there is nothing wrong with staying with the "in the trenches" route.
SirWired
P.S. "Computer Networks" by Tannenbaum (the Minux guy) is an excellent general college-level textbook on networking. (It was the book I read to prepare me for my job interview with a networking equipment vendor.) Favorite quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." Reminding customers of that one has saved my clients a LOT of money and heartache over the years. Also, "OSPF: Anatomy of an Internet Routing Protocol" by Moy is the way to go to understand how IP routing REALLY works. It's like the RFCs for RIP and OSPF, only in English. Lastly, "Soul of a New Machine" by Kidder makes just about everything technical seem less pointlessly insane/stupid. (Things still seem stupid, but you'll understand why after reading that one.) (That book is thanks to my Engineering and Society class.)
I just hate the whole concept of Linux distribution certification, because it tells me that there's something wrong with running software on it.
For most IT dept.-written apps that rely on super-common well-known library functions, no, the distribution doesn't make much of a difference. But once you start doing lower-level stuff (like the sort of stuff every software application IBM sells does), things start to not work right.
This is a big problem with Linux, and no amount of wishful thinking will make the problem go away. Apps not working on all distributions is exactly the sort of problem that the Linux Standards Base (went nowhere) and United Linux (supported by Caldera/SCO) were supposed to prevent.
Organisations generally just try it out on a newer version of an OS, and if it works OK in a trial period (even if they have to tweak things to get it to work) they go with it, and they don't fly into a massive panic.
Maybe some IT shop that doesn't care about their software actually working can do that, but actual software companies that make their living selling software MUST perform testing.
Yes, there are many organizations that do that, but those are either small and/or low-quality IT shops and/or non-critical apps.
I have several healthcare industry customers that are running OS software that is coming up on three years of ageing out of OS vendor support because their app vendor STILL hasn't certified a more recent O/S version. For them, and most customers, the app vendor support is far more important than OS vendor support, because they know that most day-to-day bugs are in their apps, not their OS. Personally, I know that I crash Mozilla (and other apps) a heck of a lot more than I have ever crashed Windows.
If Oracle can say "Yes, this will run" to their customers, and their customers try it out and it does actually run, then no one will care.
Those customers will care very much when they try and call IBM to receive assistance under their support contract for their expensive and complex application and IBM says "Sorry Mr. Customer, you are running in an extremely unsupported and untested environment." Usually this will be accompanied by some limited best-effort support to make sure that it is not an obvious bug in the product.
Now if enough customers ask for it (and are willing to pay), I am sure that IBM will be more than happy to certify their apps on Oracle Linux. Yes, Oracle is a competitor, but so is M$, and plenty of IBM software runs on Windows. But IBM is not going to go out and certify Oracle Linux just because Oracle is whining about it. I am equally sure that if IBM rolled out their own distro tomorrow, Oracle would not be falling over themselves to certify their apps for it either.
This whole concept of distributors and software vendors protecting themselves (and engineering some lock-in, incidentally) by certifying, or certifying for, certain distributions just isn't helping Linux or open source software get more widely used.
The fact of the matter is that there ARE differences between distributions, and those differences have been known to break a lot of applications. Because of this, there is no way for a software vendor to get around distribution certification. If you certified your mega-dollar application to run on any Linux distro, what do you do the first time some clown calls up with some home-grown hybrid of five different distros and wonders why it doesn't work?
Software companies are in the business of making money, not "helping Linux or open source software get more widely used." If Linux distro writers want to make the burden of application certification easier, then the onus is on the Linux folks to get their act together and make Linux distros more homogenous. Don't blame the software vendors for this sorry state of affairs.
SirWired
One thing you are overlooking is that those numbers are the sum for the entire UK law enforcement apparatus, not just terrorism-related investigations. No conclusions can be drawn from those numbers as to how useful the requests have been.
SirWired
Since you're complaining about someone pulling numbers out of their ass, care to share the basis of your "incorrect and sensationalist" judgment?
Where in the article does it break down the 439k by type of requests?
Sure, I'd be happy to:
Your first hint should be this statement in the article:
nearly 4,000 errors were reported in a 15-month period from 2005 to 2006. While most appeared to concern "lower-level data" such as requests for telephone lists and individual e-mail addresses, 67 were mistakes concerning direct interception of communications.
This means that approx. 3900 of the errors made in the requests were NOT for actual communication interception. We can guess from that alone that the majority of the requests are not for taps, but for the sort of information that one would obtain in the U.S. in a subpeona.(sp?) or National Security Letter. That alone makes the headline a likely extremely incorrect statement.
If you actual trawl the web for the report, you won't find it, (or, at least I can't), but looking at the original article and looking at older reports, we can draw some conclusions.
The article states that warrants are only necessary for actual communication interception. If we look at the 2004 report from this guy, we can see in the appendix that in 2004, there were only 1849 warrants issued. (And there were 45 errors reported with those interceptions.) I sincerely doubt that the requests for taps have incresed by over two orders of magnitude in two years. The manpower issues alone associated with such a thing would be staggering.
SirWired
There were NOT 439,000 requests to tap phones. There were 439,000 requests for "communications information". This includes requests for lists of e-mail addresses, lists of numbers called, etc, in addition to taps.
I'm not saying that is a good or bad thing, just that the headline is incorrect and sensationalist.
SirWired
When that Wallace a$$hole decided that the GPL/Linux was destroying the market for for-pay OS'es by giving them away, he was completely laughed off of Slashdot, and the courts also.
But now some tool says that IBM is destroying the market for for-pay IDE's and DB's by giving them away, and actually gets an article posted on Slashdot as serious grounds for discussion.
Please explain to me how that works.
As the descision in Wallace pointed out, giving something away where you have absolutely no way to raise the price later is not illegal, or even immoral, predatory behavior. Anti-trust law is designed and intended to protect consumers, not necessarily competitors.
SirWired
Just like DVD, most people's first DVD player was a PS2.
Where on earth did you come up with THAT? The PS2 was a good-selling console, but it didn't sell THAT well. According to the SanJose Mercury News, lifetime sales for the PS2 in the U.S., as of the end of 2006, was 37.1 million. According to Nielsen, DVD currently has 80% market penetration, and there are approx. 113M U.S. households. (according to the Census), meaning that 90.4M U.S. households have a DVD player. An unknown number of those may have purchased a PS2 AFTER they bought a DVD player. (That was the case in my house.)
Maybe for the households that bought a PS2, it is possible (but not certain) that "most" of them had it as their first player, but that does not translate to the U.S. market overall.
SirWired
Let's just say that I won't be investing my life savings into some MMORPG anytime soon. Unless the universe is STRICTLY limited so that actual cash dollars MUST come in (either through monthly fees or deposits) before money is created (including money "created" by NPC's), this will likely crash 'n burn.
The entirely expected, and disturbing part of the "Cash Card" user agreement is as follows:
"MindArk may, at MindArk's sole discretion refuse a request for authorization of any Entropia Universe Cash Card transaction or may deactivate the Entropia Universe Cash Card without notice and may notify third parties of such refusal or deactivation as MindArk determines is necessary." The Cash Card is one of the ways you get money out of the system (via ATM's), so if it gets deactivated, that hurts. While I wasn't able to find any information on it, I suspect the direct bank-transfer system has a similar caveat.
This whole setup reminds me of "Stock Generation", an online Ponzi scheme set up as a "game" several years ago. Google can probably dig up details.
SirWired
Yes, the condenser sits outside the building. However the "condensing" in the word "condensor" refers to the condensing of the refrigerant under pressure within the outdoor refrigerant tubing, not the condensing of water on the coils. Water condensation occurs on the evaporator coils. (The Evaporation referred to in the name refers to the evaporation of the refrigerant within the evaporator coils once it passes through the restrictive orifice.) The evaporator is usually located inside the building, or in the case of a data center, on the raised floor itself.
This is the case even with a standard home split A/C, which has a drain coming out of the cabinet where the indoor coils reside to drain off evap condensate.
Before you insult other posters, please obtain a clue first.
SirWired
Okay, if Mr. Evans is such a bogus authority on tax law, why do tax protestors keep LOSING with the same bogus crap year after year? If you go to court with the arguments in that web page, you WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY LOSE. Period. End of story.
Tax Protestor arguments are based on a tortured reading of the law and various court decisions over the year. Essentially, they come down to: "Because of the way the law is written, the income tax is mostly uncollectable, but it is only through the government's incorrect reading of the law that tax is collected."
For Tax Protestor arguments to be correct, one of the following MUST be true:
A) The law is unambiguous, and the income tax, as currently enforced by the Internal Revenue Service, is more-or-less illegal.
If this were true, then I think thousands of judges across the land (who have ACTUAL legal training, experience, and expertise) would have reached the same conclusion by now, and Tax Protestor cases would be a lot more successful than they are. Either that, or there is some huge conspiracy by thousands of judges over the years to side with the governemnt to enforce the Internal Revenue Code incorrectly. If you believe that, any futher argument is futile, since it is impossible to argue with a conspriacy theorist.
B) The law is ambiguous, and the court's (and IRS's) interpretation of the law is more-or-less incorrect.
In cases where a law is ambiguous, the courts refer to "congressional intent" to try and figure out what Congress had in mind when it passed a law that is insufficiently precise. (The courts cannot simply declare all imprecise laws invalid, or there wouldn't be many laws left.) If courts have been mis-interpreting Congressional intent all these years and Congress did not mean to have the income tax enforced in more-or-less the way it is now, they would have passed a law by now clearing up their intent.
SirWired