> So, there are reserves that are "unattainable" because it is not energetically > sane to extract, and they will never be economically feasible no matter the price.
Besides the energy balance point, there is also the point where extraction of a resource does so much damage to the Earth that it would be better to die peacefully than to die very slowly in the hell that would be created by extracting it. Many of the marginal oil reserves fall into this category, requiring the total destruction of large areas (not neglecting the water that has to be robbed from elsewhere to feed the extraction process) to get it with both anticipated direct and unknown 2nd- and 3rd-order effects on the planet's ecology.
> It's just like the people who drive "green" cars like the Prius. Do they not > realize that the car will only run for about 100,000 miles before they have > to replace some ridiculously expensive component? "But it's for the > environment!" they'll claim. So the majority of consumers in the USA are > concerned with "the environment" over their pocketbook? I think not...
Source please? Our neighbors purchased the first Prius in our metro area, and Toyota gave them a thank-you gift of a lifetime warranty so they have no incentive to under-report problems. Their Prius is around 120k and has had zero major maintenance required. Including batteries. That's pretty typical of Prius experience I have read about.
>> it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to >> lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides
> Isn't that the same as saying that companies like the functionality > and are willing to pay for it?
I think it is a more general unwillingness to accept that the client-server model works pretty darn well for many business-intensive apps, and that fat clients often are better suited to business use than browser-based apps. If pure mobility is the goal than the browser-based systems are a necessity, but I have seen too many unfortunate office workers clicking away at browser windows for tasks that could have been handled in seconds by a directly-connected interface.
> I dunno, the NTSB usually drags their feet before stating anything. > They usually don't make statements about suspicion of what may have > happened without specific evidence.
The United States' NTSB conducts extremely thorough and detailed investigations, with careful intermediate releases of information and preliminary conclusions prior to the issuance of a complete final report. It very deliberately does not leap to conclusions since first impressions and quick conclusions are often wrong. It makes mistakes, as all human institutions do, but it is the best technical investigation resource we have.
All of which is a bit beside the point, since the primary investigative agency in this incident is the French aviation authority with some parts of the investigation being conducted by the Brazilian authority. The US NTSB and FAA are observing, but have no investigatory role in this case.
> Do you really think having to write software on 3 different > systems will result in less malware?
Do you really thing that monocrop agriculture could destroy an entire civilization? Oh wait...
And when NASA attempted to build the ultimate fail-safe computer system for the Shuttle do you really think they wasted their money having 1 of the 5 CPUs built, designed, and programmed by an entirely separate organization than the primary contractor and prohibiting the two design groups from communicating with one another? Oh wait...
"...high bandwidth, low latency..."? Low latency? Is the author working on some alternative universe Internet with low latency, rather than the high, increasing, and highly variable latency of the Internet here in this universe/on this planet? Or perhaps he has a telco that isn't continuously raising the price of T1s and T3s to force him onto high-latency IP connectivity "solutions"?
I have a hard time seeing how something larger and more powerful than most of Goddard's devices can be called a "model". Amateur-built, sure. But not a "model".
> "Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous > it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our > body's medical status?
One thing you find as you get older and start having more tests, particularly if you have a doctor that likes to keep up with the latest research, is that each test you have for a specific parameter will also return results on 8-10 other parameters - that's just the way med labs are set up. And of those 8-10 parameters neither your doctor nor you intended to test at least one will be out-of-limits for your sex/age/weight/height. A little research in the latest medical data (by your doctor) or you (on the Internet) will quickly reveal that having parameter 7 out-of-limit can lead to immediate doom. Or not - the research is inconclusive.
So what do you do now? As I said every time you have a test you are going to come back with at least 1, and maybe more, new things to be concerned about. Should you start some sort of treatment for that out-of-limit condition? What side effects should you accept for treating something that was causing you no problems? What new conditions will be revealed every year when you are tested for the consequences of taking the treatment for the last revealed problem?
I saw in the WSJ about a year ago that the FDA was getting ready to approve 5 new reactive protein tests. Well, the c-reactive-protein test has been of some benefit in diagnosing early-stage heart disease. Maybe. Or maybe it has just increased sales of Lipitor(tm); no one is sure. What about these 5 new proteins? Should we all be tested for them? Why?
> Sorry, English is not my first language and I already > thought that I didn't use the right word. I even used > my dictionary, but to no avail.
My apologies - I did not mean to criticize the English skills of a non-native-speaker. In general United States English usage a person or object is granted (or possesses) a certificate, and is then said to be certified. As I noted the world of aviation recently (within the last 10 years) started using the word "certificated" (ser-tif-eh-cate-ed). English has so many variants of everything that that word might appear in a comprehensive dictionary. But it was not used AFAIK until about 10 years ago.
I have no idea why the aviation world decided that the perfectly good words "certify" and "certified", used to describe those concepts since the dawn of aviation regulation, should be replaced with abominations such as "certificate" and "certificated". But let's not bring yet another set of made-up words into the realm of software - we already have too many of them as it is.
=== Reading about Windows 2003 Clustering makes the whole process sounds easy, while Linux and FreeBSD just seem overly complicated. ===
Well, yes, that is how Microsoft makes its money: by releasing versions of complex technology that seem easy compared to the archaic legacy technology. Key word there is "seem", of course; when the chips are really down you will find out if (a) the Microsoft system was as good as, or even the equivalent of, the "archaic" version (b) your deep understanding of the problem you are facing, and ability to fix it, has been improved or disimproved by having the complexity hidden from you by a friendly interface.
YMMV. Obviously Microsoft shifts a lot of kit.
sPh
By the way, I would look at Contegix, Connectria, or similar hosted services provider serving small and medium sized businesses. If you are unfamiliar with the technology hand it over to someone who is whose price is reasonable.
===Typically, it takes 8-9 months to truly test and stabilise a RAC system. As I've said somewhere else, some people elect to spend all of those nine months before going production whereas others split it so that some of the time is spent before and, indeed, some of it after going production.
But that's not all: Even when the system has been stabilised and runs fine, it will a couple of times a year or more often go down and create problems that you never saw before.
It's then time to call in external experts, but instead of just fixing the current cause of your IT crisis, I'd like to suggest that you instead consider the situation as one where you need to spend a good deal of resources in stabilising your system again - until the next IT crisis shows up.
Your system will never be truly stable when it's complex. The amount of effort and money you'll need to spend on humans being able to react to problems, running the system day-to-day, and - very important - keep them on their toes by having realistic (terribly expensive) test systems, courses, drills on realistic gear, networks of people who can help right now, and so forth... is huge.
The ironic thing is this: If you decide that you can live with downtime, and therefor with a much less complex system - your uptime will increase. Of course. ===
And that corresponds pretty well to my experience: the more effort people make to duplicate hardware and build redundant failover environments the more failures and downtime they experience. Consider as well the concept of ETOPS and why the 777 has only two engines.
> SOX only applies to publicly traded companies. A huge > number of US companies do not give a damn about Sarbanes-Oxley.
The US Federal Courts adopted a new discovery rule as of January 1st, 2007 which essentially requires any entity that might be involved in a federal lawsuit to have e-mail archiving. Most non-public companies I have dealt with are not complying with this (and many may not even know about it), but it is gradually becoming an item for the annual audits that most companies need to get bank loans, etc.
One thing to keep in mind when you read statement such as "Destroy R. Worlds, former Director of Bomb Design at Los Alamos, said of Joe Amateur's work 'That's very well-done'" is this: reading between the lines of many interviews, articles, and books about and by former weaponeers they give out a lot of misleading, and/or misdirecting, information about how _exactly_ devices are built. They talk openly about the general principles and their scientific and political implications, but when the discussion/interview/chapter turns to the actual details of design, well, the replies turn a bit fuzzy or clever. I suspect that either by explicit training or shared values they give away very little and much of what they say would deliberately lead anyone following down the wrong path.
> Although data 'calls' on 21Mbps networks and equipment have been made > in the labs and in demonstrations, Australia is the first place in the > world where such a call has been made
Contents of the call:
"Hello. [Censored by Australian Internet Censorship Agency] home and then [Censored by Australian Internet Censorship Agency] and he said [Censored by Australian Internet Censorship Agency]. Thanks"
Looks like the proposal is to use rotary regenerative air heaters (often known as Ljungstrom(tm) heaters in the power plant biz) for a low-temperature application.
I once gave a presentation to senior management on a situation with the air heaters at our plant; I had to practice saying "Ljungstrom re-gen-er-a-tive heater" for two weeks before I could do it without stumbling!
f-prot is still in business and seems to do fairly well. I think they do still have a free version, but their core home version is something like $19.95 for a two year subscription covering install on up to 5 family PCs. It always does reasonably well on the comparison tests (given that no AV will catch every piece of malware out there) and doesn't slow the system down much if at all.
Reminds me of architects and developers who create generic database access engines so their product can be "platform independent" and then wonder why its performance is so bad no matter which of the six major databases is used.
> Those who don't buy IBM kit are condemned to reimpliment > (badly, and for the rest of their lives) what IBM have been > doing for decades.
First, the troll rating is utterly unjustified. Mod parent up.
IBM is not without its own faults. Perhaps less so now than in the 1970s and 80s when the push for PCs took root, but it has its own weaknesses. Even taking that into account it _is_ ridiculous to see the Wintel world groping toward the kind if high availability and virtualization that IBM, DEC, CDC, and others perfected in the 1960s/70.
Slashdot Mirror
> So, there are reserves that are "unattainable" because it is not energetically
> sane to extract, and they will never be economically feasible no matter the price.
Besides the energy balance point, there is also the point where extraction of a resource does so much damage to the Earth that it would be better to die peacefully than to die very slowly in the hell that would be created by extracting it. Many of the marginal oil reserves fall into this category, requiring the total destruction of large areas (not neglecting the water that has to be robbed from elsewhere to feed the extraction process) to get it with both anticipated direct and unknown 2nd- and 3rd-order effects on the planet's ecology.
sPh
> It's just like the people who drive "green" cars like the Prius. Do they not
> realize that the car will only run for about 100,000 miles before they have
> to replace some ridiculously expensive component? "But it's for the
> environment!" they'll claim. So the majority of consumers in the USA are
> concerned with "the environment" over their pocketbook? I think not...
Source please? Our neighbors purchased the first Prius in our metro area, and Toyota gave them a thank-you gift of a lifetime warranty so they have no incentive to under-report problems. Their Prius is around 120k and has had zero major maintenance required. Including batteries. That's pretty typical of Prius experience I have read about.
sPh
>> it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to
>> lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides
> Isn't that the same as saying that companies like the functionality
> and are willing to pay for it?
I think it is a more general unwillingness to accept that the client-server model works pretty darn well for many business-intensive apps, and that fat clients often are better suited to business use than browser-based apps. If pure mobility is the goal than the browser-based systems are a necessity, but I have seen too many unfortunate office workers clicking away at browser windows for tasks that could have been handled in seconds by a directly-connected interface.
sPh
Political analyst Matthew Yglesias over at CAP has a fairly good take on both the book and the review at the CAP web site.
sPh
> I dunno, the NTSB usually drags their feet before stating anything.
> They usually don't make statements about suspicion of what may have
> happened without specific evidence.
The United States' NTSB conducts extremely thorough and detailed investigations, with careful intermediate releases of information and preliminary conclusions prior to the issuance of a complete final report. It very deliberately does not leap to conclusions since first impressions and quick conclusions are often wrong. It makes mistakes, as all human institutions do, but it is the best technical investigation resource we have.
All of which is a bit beside the point, since the primary investigative agency in this incident is the French aviation authority with some parts of the investigation being conducted by the Brazilian authority. The US NTSB and FAA are observing, but have no investigatory role in this case.
sPh
> Do you really think having to write software on 3 different
> systems will result in less malware?
Do you really thing that monocrop agriculture could destroy an entire civilization? Oh wait...
And when NASA attempted to build the ultimate fail-safe computer system for the Shuttle do you really think they wasted their money having 1 of the 5 CPUs built, designed, and programmed by an entirely separate organization than the primary contractor and prohibiting the two design groups from communicating with one another? Oh wait...
sPh
"...high bandwidth, low latency..."? Low latency? Is the author working on some alternative universe Internet with low latency, rather than the high, increasing, and highly variable latency of the Internet here in this universe/on this planet? Or perhaps he has a telco that isn't continuously raising the price of T1s and T3s to force him onto high-latency IP connectivity "solutions"?
sPh
> I read the PDF of the exploit and from what it states the code...
I hope you checked your system for rootkits after reading a PDF.
sPh
Wish I were joking...
I have a hard time seeing how something larger and more powerful than most of Goddard's devices can be called a "model". Amateur-built, sure. But not a "model".
sPh
> "Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous
> it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our
> body's medical status?
One thing you find as you get older and start having more tests, particularly if you have a doctor that likes to keep up with the latest research, is that each test you have for a specific parameter will also return results on 8-10 other parameters - that's just the way med labs are set up. And of those 8-10 parameters neither your doctor nor you intended to test at least one will be out-of-limits for your sex/age/weight/height. A little research in the latest medical data (by your doctor) or you (on the Internet) will quickly reveal that having parameter 7 out-of-limit can lead to immediate doom. Or not - the research is inconclusive.
So what do you do now? As I said every time you have a test you are going to come back with at least 1, and maybe more, new things to be concerned about. Should you start some sort of treatment for that out-of-limit condition? What side effects should you accept for treating something that was causing you no problems? What new conditions will be revealed every year when you are tested for the consequences of taking the treatment for the last revealed problem?
I saw in the WSJ about a year ago that the FDA was getting ready to approve 5 new reactive protein tests. Well, the c-reactive-protein test has been of some benefit in diagnosing early-stage heart disease. Maybe. Or maybe it has just increased sales of Lipitor(tm); no one is sure. What about these 5 new proteins? Should we all be tested for them? Why?
sPh
> Sorry, English is not my first language and I already
> thought that I didn't use the right word. I even used
> my dictionary, but to no avail.
My apologies - I did not mean to criticize the English skills of a non-native-speaker. In general United States English usage a person or object is granted (or possesses) a certificate, and is then said to be certified. As I noted the world of aviation recently (within the last 10 years) started using the word "certificated" (ser-tif-eh-cate-ed). English has so many variants of everything that that word might appear in a comprehensive dictionary. But it was not used AFAIK until about 10 years ago.
sPh
> You have to certificate each and every release
I have no idea why the aviation world decided that the perfectly good words "certify" and "certified", used to describe those concepts since the dawn of aviation regulation, should be replaced with abominations such as "certificate" and "certificated". But let's not bring yet another set of made-up words into the realm of software - we already have too many of them as it is.
sPh
Well, yes, that is how Microsoft makes its money: by releasing versions of complex technology that seem easy compared to the archaic legacy technology. Key word there is "seem", of course; when the chips are really down you will find out if (a) the Microsoft system was as good as, or even the equivalent of, the "archaic" version (b) your deep understanding of the problem you are facing, and ability to fix it, has been improved or disimproved by having the complexity hidden from you by a friendly interface.
YMMV. Obviously Microsoft shifts a lot of kit.
sPh
By the way, I would look at Contegix, Connectria, or similar hosted services provider serving small and medium sized businesses. If you are unfamiliar with the technology hand it over to someone who is whose price is reasonable.
First, I suggest you read and think deeply about Moens Nogood's essay "So Few Really Need Uptime".
Key quote:
And that corresponds pretty well to my experience: the more effort people make to duplicate hardware and build redundant failover environments the more failures and downtime they experience. Consider as well the concept of ETOPS and why the 777 has only two engines.
sPh
Has anyone considered the possibility that as of this morning 95% of the sites on the Internet are infected with malware?
sPh
> SOX only applies to publicly traded companies. A huge
> number of US companies do not give a damn about Sarbanes-Oxley.
The US Federal Courts adopted a new discovery rule as of January 1st, 2007 which essentially requires any entity that might be involved in a federal lawsuit to have e-mail archiving. Most non-public companies I have dealt with are not complying with this (and many may not even know about it), but it is gradually becoming an item for the annual audits that most companies need to get bank loans, etc.
sPh
One thing to keep in mind when you read statement such as "Destroy R. Worlds, former Director of Bomb Design at Los Alamos, said of Joe Amateur's work 'That's very well-done'" is this: reading between the lines of many interviews, articles, and books about and by former weaponeers they give out a lot of misleading, and/or misdirecting, information about how _exactly_ devices are built. They talk openly about the general principles and their scientific and political implications, but when the discussion/interview/chapter turns to the actual details of design, well, the replies turn a bit fuzzy or clever. I suspect that either by explicit training or shared values they give away very little and much of what they say would deliberately lead anyone following down the wrong path.
sPh
> Although data 'calls' on 21Mbps networks and equipment have been made
> in the labs and in demonstrations, Australia is the first place in the
> world where such a call has been made
Contents of the call:
"Hello. [Censored by Australian Internet Censorship Agency] home and then [Censored by Australian Internet Censorship Agency] and he said [Censored by Australian Internet Censorship Agency]. Thanks"
sPh
> That would be worth of a patent..
You are late by about 100 years. Look up Ljungstrom(tm)...
sPh
Looks like the proposal is to use rotary regenerative air heaters (often known as Ljungstrom(tm) heaters in the power plant biz) for a low-temperature application.
I once gave a presentation to senior management on a situation with the air heaters at our plant; I had to practice saying "Ljungstrom re-gen-er-a-tive heater" for two weeks before I could do it without stumbling!
sPh
f-prot is still in business and seems to do fairly well. I think they do still have a free version, but their core home version is something like $19.95 for a two year subscription covering install on up to 5 family PCs. It always does reasonably well on the comparison tests (given that no AV will catch every piece of malware out there) and doesn't slow the system down much if at all.
sPh
> The IBEX Launch Blog will go active
> "about 2 hours before launch
The blog will be updated every two hours until the probe reaches the edge of the solar system.
27 years from now.
sPh
Reminds me of architects and developers who create generic database access engines so their product can be "platform independent" and then wonder why its performance is so bad no matter which of the six major databases is used.
sPh
> Those who don't buy IBM kit are condemned to reimpliment
> (badly, and for the rest of their lives) what IBM have been
> doing for decades.
First, the troll rating is utterly unjustified. Mod parent up.
IBM is not without its own faults. Perhaps less so now than in the 1970s and 80s when the push for PCs took root, but it has its own weaknesses. Even taking that into account it _is_ ridiculous to see the Wintel world groping toward the kind if high availability and virtualization that IBM, DEC, CDC, and others perfected in the 1960s/70.
sPh
> On the plus side, we've very few snakes left.
Unfortunately, we depend on the snakes to keep the rats under control.
sPh