We have an ASP.NET application running on.NET..NET is running on the userland Windows subsystems. These subsystems are running on the NT kernel. The NT kernel is then running on hardware.
Just a nit or two but
a. Calling it the Windows NT kernel is a bit of a misnomer - All the vestiges of the NT kernel were removed for the XP / 2003 rewrite...
b. the actual process stack looks like this:
world wide web worker process (w3wp.exe) -> HttpApplication object -> HttpModule object ->.NET runtime -> ISAPI interface -> IIS6 -> windows API -> usermode to kernelmode marshal -> kernel stuff
Unless you're running IIS6 in native kernel mode in which case it looks like this
The big advantage of that is of course if the request can be handled entirely by the kernel mode HTTP server (such as a request coming straight out of.NET cache, or one with invalid authentication credentials) then it never hits usermode at all... also vastly simplifies the process model...
I saw a comparison of data caching between the two modes once - it was a 64K page made by concatentating a 1K string and outputting it - the IIS5-style user mode HttpModule handled 40-60 requests per second IIRC... very respectable for running IIS on a laptop with a load client and powerpoint and a half dozen other things going on...
He flipped the switch in machine.config to use kernel mode HTTP handling - hit 1200 requests per second immediately - and it was obvious that the limitation was no longer the server but the load client...
He explained he chose a 64K test page to prove that the kernelmode driver wouldn't have any datapaging problems with caching...
To do halfway around the world in 2 hours, we need to get 6000 miles = 31,680,000 feet, accelerating from zero, in 1 hour = 3600 seconds. For that, we need a = 2x / t^2 = 4.89 ft / sec^2 = 0.15 g.
Whether that's too much to be comfortable or healthy, I don't know.
Well consider that the total vector acceleration felt by you in gravity is 1G at rest
So at.15G acceleration, assuming you are accelerating along the orthogonal plane to gravity, the total vector acceleration felt by you would be 1.01G.
Let's say you weigh 200 lbs - then the extra weight your body would have to handle is 2 lbs.
Let's say you're accelerating straight up - then the total vector acceleration felt by you would be 1.15G - equivalent to weighing an extra 30 lbs. Even then I don't think you're in much danger...
oh BTW - G = unit of measure, 9.8 m/s^2, equal to the acceleration experience by a mass at sea level on earth. g = symbol for gravitational force in physics equations
I feel this overwhelming urge to start a homeless character who will sleep in their bushes and pee on their steps.
They exist... in overwhelming numbers since it became free with no verification or IP logging to create such a beast... they're called griefers... and they brought the whole world down for the last three weekends in a row...
It seems that letting it turn somewhat for a limited amount of time would be far better than risking its destruction to preserve its orientation at all costs.
Most of our spacecraft are designed to turn, rotisserie style, under the sun's undiminished glare... I once read in an article that if the space shuttle didn't rotate in this manner, the astronauts would be cooked in a matter of hours...
If that's the case for the ISS, then a risk of damage and harm seems much better than certain death...
If not, then let the damn thing list until you can fix it...
What are you talking about? My co-workers are all family men and women that just want to put in their 8 hours and go home to be their kids soccer taxi service. Why would I want to socialize with them?
Ditto. Vast majority of my coworkers are concerned about which school is better, what's for dinner that night, getting in their excercise routine, and whatever's on prime time that night.
I'm concerned about how long it's going to take me to write that new thing in second life, or beat that video game, or taking my wife out to the hookah bar...
There's really not much to socialize ABOUT here...
I know I'm responding to a troll, but this brings up a serious point. Millions of people are walking around (and reproducing) who by all rights of nature should be dead. Are we weakening ourselves as a species? I think so...
With the exception of domestic breeds of animals, nearly the entire wild kingdom is in better health than us... I forget the numbers, but the incidents of nearly all genetic-related health defects, such as blindness or diabetes, is drastically less in the animal world.
Society brought about two fundamental sea-changes in the way we breed and grow, and our evolution has been guided by these processes for millenia - and I wonder if the idea of consciousness and society, and these two changes, aren't in fact prerequisite...
The first change was care of the weakest; instead of culling, human cultures began coddling. Hospice care, midwives, and canes were just the beginning. Then came eyeglasses, insulin shots, antibiotics. Now we've got a million ways to keep an organism that will die without treatment alive, all varying according to symptoms and severity. What this means is that, except for the most inconvenient, physically disfiguring, or social / mental impairment, there's no real evolutionary pressure to decrease this dependance on modern medical technology.
The second change was consensual front-to-front (or whatever) recreational sex. We found out we liked having sex, and our new anatomies were really well designed for it. Then we found out we liked it even more if we did it often. Then we found out that we really really liked it when everyone involved chose to do it and was having fun. This gives us an ability to meta-evolve; by preferentially choosing partners that show traits that we find desirable, and one may assume in some percent of cases these are normalized to some societal mean, we have given ourselves the ability to self-direct evolution for future generations, merely by creating a society that values some individuals and doesn't others.
I think we're going to see that now that we're fully conscious, evolution will continue to be less and less about the physical body, at a pace roughly equivalent with increases in medical technology, and will be more and more about creating organisms that function excellently as part of a large diverse society - and evolution starts and ends at sexual desire on this score.
This was hardly that personal. Hawley is the director of the TSA, and these were grunts at an airport. This was akin to telling the average private in Iraq that "Donald Rumsfeld is an idiot".
My brother is ex army... recent discharge... and according to him, that is in fact the consensus among privates in Iraq...
Given the scope of the operation, are these losses to be expected or is this an example of poor government security standards?
Well I haven't even RTFA yet but let's see what the summary says shall we?
According to Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, 'All of the equipment that was lost or stolen contained protections to prevent a breach of personal information.'
Any security incident that does NOT result in disclosing personal information sounds like an excellent security standard to me...
Maybe these bloated planets are the only large enough for us to be able to see at this point.
There are certainly limits to the lower range of sizes of planets we can detect - and since most detection methods work based on gravitational influence, it is apparent that a large worlds close in to its sun will be easier to detect than a small one far away.
Many of the first planets we found were very large with very close orbits, however recently we've been able to detect terrestrial - "rocky" that is as opposed to gas giant (none earth sized or smaller yet, alas) - planets around other stars
So while these planets may in fact be common (and I would suspect internal heating more than some esoteric mechanism that we don't understand to explain their densities), we also know of many other types of planets - the most common being dense hot giants with very close orbits to their primaries...
But people like me wanting to roll out a database cluster, getting a cpu with four cores could save me $75,000 per CPU running M$ SQL Server. Oh the dream of running 16 cores on 4 CPU's
quoth the parent:
Till Oracle and Microsoft revise their licensing terms to take into account multiple cores, that is.
SQL Server already requires a license per CPU - not sure if a core counts or not, but I think the O/S sees it as a CPU, therefore it requires an extra license...
before Microsoft starts charging more for multi-core installations? Seriously, if quad core means fewer boxes in the rack, it means fewer licenses.
Ummm try a few years ago? We have a fair size data center here and most of our Microsoft server software beyond the O/S itself is licensed per core, not per computer. 4-core box = run on one proc or buy four licenses.
Since all the actors are older, how are they going to portray them as younger looking? I'm mostly wondering about Gandolf and Gollum.
I wouldn't worry about Gandolf or Bilbo. Gollum's a big maybe
Gandolf is an angel / god that first showed up during the early years of the Middle Age - approx 2000 years before the events in LoTR
Gollum found the ring some time after Sauron was defeated the first time - and he and Bilbo both were supposedly ageless while in posession of the ring. I believe Gollum supposedly aged after losing the ring but IIRC, LoTR didn't really go into that in the movies so no need to make Gollum appear any different in the prequel?
On the other hand, I knew an old hardware hacker running a small computer shop in rural NC... customers would bring in failed drives, if he could determine the failure was on the controller, he would find a spare drive with the same model number and swap out the controllers - revived the drive with data intact.
Not sure if it's possible / easy to do that with these particular drives, but it's worth looking into...
I highly doubt that it's slashdotted... far more likely it's SLdotted - SL's website is never that fast anyways, and can crash / become unusable from load related problems completely and totally unrelated to slashdot, in my experience...
An intruder gained access to the database . So they're resetting passwords. Good.
But they're using the "security question"... which is also probally in the same database that was already compromised?
ironically, I just got done going through the process when I decided to check slashdot lol.
In order to load the security question you have to click on a link with a UUID in an e-mail to your registered address - the attacker would have to have access to your e-mail as well.
Also I would note that the attacker got encrypted passwords - no word on how strong the encryption was, but there's at least even money he can't read them anyways.
If you did, then you should really realize that neither CGI nor J2EE are scripting languages... assuming you have half a developer.brain.
Technically, neither is ASP.NET, it being compiled to IL in much the same way Java is compiled to bytecode (and with similar server container object models, as well). But the point wasn't to nitpick the finer points of technical naming of strange and varied runtimes - the point was to voice my opinion about the relative merits of these choices, particularly with regards to the type of tool being discussed.
Uh-huh. You've tried them all? Really?
Yeap. There are current J2EE production sites with large userbases that I wrote. We used to run some internal company apps on PHP but found the environment cumbersome and primitive. Perl's a requirement for any unix hacker, and while I've never written a website in it, nor would I want to. My first ever web server was a straight CGI doing 3D image rendering on request. And, this is the point of my previous post, after honestly giving many of the more popular options their chance, given the choice, I'll take Expressions and ASP.NET against any of the alternatives without hesitation or equivocation, and therefore I don't really care if Expressions Web Designer supports any other technologies or not...
So why does Dreamweaver support anything except ColdFusion?
That's what they chose to do with their tool - and its worked to them. They wanted to build a good development tool allowing designers to pick up one skillset that would allow them to be productive in a variety of environments. Their tool was built with the idea of becoming the tool that designers would prefer to use and learn - and is wildly succesful for it.
Microsoft does not want to compete with Dreamweaver. Frontpage and Interdev convinced them they would fail miserably at it. Instead they wanted to focus on their core competency and build a tool far better than any competitor could for their development environment. They succeeded, and as someone who uses their environment I'm very excited about it.
Go ahead use Dreamweaver, I'm glad you have it. I have the luxury of working for a consulting firm that also functions as a hosting provider so we can use a wholly Microsoft environment - and I'd wager the rich development tools we have now are better than the cross-platform analogues in the majority of cases. There are definitely instances where that isn't the case - Erwin is a clear example of a data modeller better than anything in the Microsoft toolset. This is one case where that was the case and isn't anymore, and I can't say I'm too upset about that...
Did you really expect Microsoft to build a Web Designer that didn't target their platform? Expressions is part of Visual Studio - it was unveiled at Professional Developers Conference 2005. Of course it's going to target ASP.NET - that's the web development language for Visual Studio.NET.
What I don't understand is why anyone would think they would do anything different? You may think the "right" way to make software like this is to target multiple platforms - but that doesn't make it the right way. Microsoft does not build software that way. Arguably they have proven that their way is more "right" - by the Heinlein test that it is the way that is most succesful. They've built a multinational corporate entity, producing software that runs the vast majority of the world's computing equipment, and they built this empire by writing software that was meant to work well together - and didn't really care how well it worked with other software.
They've made great strides in this area lately, showing a willingness to support alternative standards and open specifications, and even recognizing that interoperability is a value proposition to their customers - but I think it's idealistic dreaming at best to hope they would build a development tool for a competing platform.
I don't do PHP, Perl, CGI, J2EE or any of the "slashdot-approved" server-side scripting languages. I don't really care if my development environment supports any of them. I've tried them all, and had paying customers for most, and honestly prefer ASP.NET. I'm not trying to start an argument about which is better - merely stating my opinion. As such, Expressions is the perfect web designer for me, and I don't think anyone doing ASP.NET development would argue with that, if all you want to do in the world is ASP.NET development, then Expressions is clearly superior to any 3rd party tool - and no secret why, Microsoft has the expertise in their own API, and most likely a deeper understanding than is available in public documentation.
hard drives are merely rotating discs or platters with a reading arm accessing them while they spin at high speeds. If something goes wrong, it grinds to a halt.
There is a second failure mode, though its far less common. It also, does not involve fire. It does involve high speed relatively high moment inertia platters and a catastrophic failure in the casing. The casing is pretty sturdy and resilient, but in some cases the only thing holding the top and bottom halves together is a screw and a bead of glue...
It was a far more common problem back when hard drives were washing-machine sized stacks of 12" platters - I heard tell of the devastation of one of those getting lose in a server room - sounds like it spun in place on the floor for a second before making a bee line to the wall, getting almost to the cieling, then flinging itself back into the room at large, had to redo the floor and walls of the whole room...
There's no way that Alaskan taxpayers would approve a tax increase for such a stupid cause
Unless of course Alaska doesn't have a state tax. Which it doesn't. Taxation on the oil pipeline provides so much revenue that it pays its residents! My brother claimed residency when he was stationed there (Operation Wolfpac for the curious) and got a nice check over and above the state taxes he paid every year!
I don't know where this money should come from or what the budgets look like - just wanted to point out that Alaska is in a unique (and enviable) position when it comes to state taxes...
Ok on the particular solution you're mentioning... tarballs could be your friend, you can create them with most any compression software, and most compression software understands disc spanning. Likewise, even more compression software can read tarballs, and you can grab individual files out of it. Tarballs are compressionless file archives, and therefore use little CPU to create - they are I/O bound, best situation you can get assuming your hard drive is an order of magnitude or so faster than the DVD burner...
Anyways, as others have pointed out, there are good solutions out there better than DVD. For instance, DVD isn't very useful for archiving high quality video. Nor is it that convenient for backing up program files - the largest of which can themselves be installed through multiple DVDs in some cases. Tape is good, a bit more expensive than DVD per media unit, but if you compare the math you'll see that it's quite a bit better per gigabyte, depending on your solution. You might complain that tape robots are too expensive, and you want a nice automated solution - and I'd agree, the prices on those things is outrageous... but its not going to be a more tedious process without one than swapping a dozen DVDs through your drive. Especially since most tape drives have higher write speeds than DVD burners... total throughput is hard to compare, because with a very fast DVD drive, the time to swap discs becomes a significant part of the cycle.
Hard drive solutions are also convenient, if error prone. Honestly, I'd rather invest in an array of inexpensive discs - seriously go for the 80 GB bottom market drives, build a RAID 5 array, acquire a cheap RAID card (Promise has a good one that can be had for about $20), and build yourself an array. You want redundancy, put more drives in it. Keep one or two spares on hand, and never have to worry about losing data while you're waiting for one to be shipped. I'll bet it'll be tons more reliable than a USB hard drive solution in the long run.
DVDs and tapes are both subject to long term storage problems, with long term storage problems - look up DVD rot, and tapes are subject to magnetic and cosmic ray damage in long term storage. Magnetic safes and faraday cages can help, but a bad tape solution can cause a failure rate close to 50% in some cases. No matter how resilient a hard drive solution you choose, it will have a life expentency measured in years, not decades.
Some say the long term solution is to continue reinvesting in your archives, upgrading the technology and transferring the data whenever required. That might in fact be the best solution - the only long term storage I would trust would be hermetically sealed optical media, and the best density I'm aware of there is HDMD at 1GB per disc - not exactly practical for an archival solution - though I must say I've put in comparable hours recording on MD as an audio technician and transferring tracks to and from my digital studio. A better solution if the budget is unlimited would be holographic media - these are almost universally caddied to protect the sensitive interference pattern, and available in insanely high densities. But this is supposed to be about the home user - expect a holographic media solution to cost more than a small car.
My suggestion throughout all this ramble? Use the RAID 5 array and backup sensitive data to something you can archive. Use tapes if you can, if not DVDs can do the job though it'll be tedious. Either way, get the right software to do the job, don't be squeamish if you have to use some compression, you'll generally still be I/O bound anyways so it won't chew your CPU up. Put the important stuff in a metal safe - offsite if you can arrange it - possibly with tiered backup - make two copies of your monthly fulls, ship one offsite, keep your weekly diffs in a safe, something of that nature. Use a rotating schedule of tapes and run the verifications - it's important to make sure your tapes aren't wearing out, that you can rely on them. Ditto with DVDs, take the extra time at burn time to verify them.
Under Windows it seems it'll swap out whether the free RAM is needed or not
That's correct - the pagefile in Windows is a direct memory map with a dirty write cache, it is always being updated to reflect currently running processes, and there's a mapper behind the scenes that maps pagefile space to physical addresses. Swapping is done by simply unallocating the memory from the pagefile, when it's needed it's paged back in.
Fundamentally, for Windows to operate well, your pagefile should be larger than your physical memory by some amount. I personally on a 2GB system would set it to memory and set autogrowth on - you'll probably never need it, but if you, you've given Windows an escape option to continue running...
It's very inefficient, but supports among other things complete bluescreen debugging, because the entire state of the machine is theoretically on disk after system recovery...
I personally agree with the Linux model - just use the swap when you need it, don't weigh down my drive with useless chatter.
Slashdot Mirror
We have an ASP.NET application running on .NET. .NET is running on the userland Windows subsystems. These subsystems are running on the NT kernel. The NT kernel is then running on hardware.
.NET runtime -> ISAPI interface -> IIS6 -> windows API -> usermode to kernelmode marshal -> kernel stuff
.NET runtime -> kernel stuff
.NET cache, or one with invalid authentication credentials) then it never hits usermode at all... also vastly simplifies the process model...
Just a nit or two but
a. Calling it the Windows NT kernel is a bit of a misnomer - All the vestiges of the NT kernel were removed for the XP / 2003 rewrite...
b. the actual process stack looks like this:
world wide web worker process (w3wp.exe) -> HttpApplication object -> HttpModule object ->
Unless you're running IIS6 in native kernel mode in which case it looks like this
w3wp.exe -> HttpApplication -> IIS6 -> usermode to kernelmode marhsal -> HttpKernel ->
The big advantage of that is of course if the request can be handled entirely by the kernel mode HTTP server (such as a request coming straight out of
I saw a comparison of data caching between the two modes once - it was a 64K page made by concatentating a 1K string and outputting it - the IIS5-style user mode HttpModule handled 40-60 requests per second IIRC... very respectable for running IIS on a laptop with a load client and powerpoint and a half dozen other things going on...
He flipped the switch in machine.config to use kernel mode HTTP handling - hit 1200 requests per second immediately - and it was obvious that the limitation was no longer the server but the load client...
He explained he chose a 64K test page to prove that the kernelmode driver wouldn't have any datapaging problems with caching...
Dude screw honey buns...
breakfast of champions is a mcgriddle. Good backup is a pop tart and some frappucino. My usual of course is coffee and fasting lol
Oh, and did I mention that our server room was a converted bank vault?
One of my clients specializes in mission critical hosting... they buy default banks and convert the vaults to server bunkers, basically.
I seem to remember hearing they bought the old atomic bunker from the city too...
To do halfway around the world in 2 hours, we need to get 6000 miles = 31,680,000 feet, accelerating from zero, in 1 hour = 3600 seconds. For that, we need a = 2x / t^2 = 4.89 ft / sec^2 = 0.15 g.
.15G acceleration, assuming you are accelerating along the orthogonal plane to gravity, the total vector acceleration felt by you would be 1.01G.
Whether that's too much to be comfortable or healthy, I don't know.
Well consider that the total vector acceleration felt by you in gravity is 1G at rest
So at
Let's say you weigh 200 lbs - then the extra weight your body would have to handle is 2 lbs.
Let's say you're accelerating straight up - then the total vector acceleration felt by you would be 1.15G - equivalent to weighing an extra 30 lbs. Even then I don't think you're in much danger...
oh BTW - G = unit of measure, 9.8 m/s^2, equal to the acceleration experience by a mass at sea level on earth. g = symbol for gravitational force in physics equations
I feel this overwhelming urge to start a homeless character who will sleep in their bushes and pee on their steps.
They exist... in overwhelming numbers since it became free with no verification or IP logging to create such a beast... they're called griefers... and they brought the whole world down for the last three weekends in a row...
It seems that letting it turn somewhat for a limited amount of time would be far better than risking its destruction to preserve its orientation at all costs.
Most of our spacecraft are designed to turn, rotisserie style, under the sun's undiminished glare... I once read in an article that if the space shuttle didn't rotate in this manner, the astronauts would be cooked in a matter of hours...
If that's the case for the ISS, then a risk of damage and harm seems much better than certain death...
If not, then let the damn thing list until you can fix it...
What are you talking about? My co-workers are all family men and women that just want to put in their 8 hours and go home to be their kids soccer taxi service. Why would I want to socialize with them?
Ditto. Vast majority of my coworkers are concerned about which school is better, what's for dinner that night, getting in their excercise routine, and whatever's on prime time that night.
I'm concerned about how long it's going to take me to write that new thing in second life, or beat that video game, or taking my wife out to the hookah bar...
There's really not much to socialize ABOUT here...
I know I'm responding to a troll, but this brings up a serious point. Millions of people are walking around (and reproducing) who by all rights of nature should be dead. Are we weakening ourselves as a species? I think so...
With the exception of domestic breeds of animals, nearly the entire wild kingdom is in better health than us... I forget the numbers, but the incidents of nearly all genetic-related health defects, such as blindness or diabetes, is drastically less in the animal world.
Society brought about two fundamental sea-changes in the way we breed and grow, and our evolution has been guided by these processes for millenia - and I wonder if the idea of consciousness and society, and these two changes, aren't in fact prerequisite...
The first change was care of the weakest; instead of culling, human cultures began coddling. Hospice care, midwives, and canes were just the beginning. Then came eyeglasses, insulin shots, antibiotics. Now we've got a million ways to keep an organism that will die without treatment alive, all varying according to symptoms and severity. What this means is that, except for the most inconvenient, physically disfiguring, or social / mental impairment, there's no real evolutionary pressure to decrease this dependance on modern medical technology.
The second change was consensual front-to-front (or whatever) recreational sex. We found out we liked having sex, and our new anatomies were really well designed for it. Then we found out we liked it even more if we did it often. Then we found out that we really really liked it when everyone involved chose to do it and was having fun. This gives us an ability to meta-evolve; by preferentially choosing partners that show traits that we find desirable, and one may assume in some percent of cases these are normalized to some societal mean, we have given ourselves the ability to self-direct evolution for future generations, merely by creating a society that values some individuals and doesn't others.
I think we're going to see that now that we're fully conscious, evolution will continue to be less and less about the physical body, at a pace roughly equivalent with increases in medical technology, and will be more and more about creating organisms that function excellently as part of a large diverse society - and evolution starts and ends at sexual desire on this score.
Try insulting a cop's mother...
This was hardly that personal. Hawley is the director of the TSA, and these were grunts at an airport. This was akin to telling the average private in Iraq that "Donald Rumsfeld is an idiot".
My brother is ex army... recent discharge... and according to him, that is in fact the consensus among privates in Iraq...
Given the scope of the operation, are these losses to be expected or is this an example of poor government security standards?
Well I haven't even RTFA yet but let's see what the summary says shall we?
According to Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, 'All of the equipment that was lost or stolen contained protections to prevent a breach of personal information.'
Any security incident that does NOT result in disclosing personal information sounds like an excellent security standard to me...
Maybe these bloated planets are the only large enough for us to be able to see at this point.
There are certainly limits to the lower range of sizes of planets we can detect - and since most detection methods work based on gravitational influence, it is apparent that a large worlds close in to its sun will be easier to detect than a small one far away.
Many of the first planets we found were very large with very close orbits, however recently we've been able to detect terrestrial - "rocky" that is as opposed to gas giant (none earth sized or smaller yet, alas) - planets around other stars
So while these planets may in fact be common (and I would suspect internal heating more than some esoteric mechanism that we don't understand to explain their densities), we also know of many other types of planets - the most common being dense hot giants with very close orbits to their primaries...
I think I need to talk with some of our licensing folks - I think in some cases we've licensed per core and not per proc...
quoth the grandparent:
But people like me wanting to roll out a database cluster, getting a cpu with four cores could save me $75,000 per CPU running M$ SQL Server. Oh the dream of running 16 cores on 4 CPU's
quoth the parent:
Till Oracle and Microsoft revise their licensing terms to take into account multiple cores, that is.
SQL Server already requires a license per CPU - not sure if a core counts or not, but I think the O/S sees it as a CPU, therefore it requires an extra license...
before Microsoft starts charging more for multi-core installations? Seriously, if quad core means fewer boxes in the rack, it means fewer licenses.
Ummm try a few years ago? We have a fair size data center here and most of our Microsoft server software beyond the O/S itself is licensed per core, not per computer. 4-core box = run on one proc or buy four licenses.
Since all the actors are older, how are they going to portray them as younger looking? I'm mostly wondering about Gandolf and Gollum.
I wouldn't worry about Gandolf or Bilbo. Gollum's a big maybe
Gandolf is an angel / god that first showed up during the early years of the Middle Age - approx 2000 years before the events in LoTR
Gollum found the ring some time after Sauron was defeated the first time - and he and Bilbo both were supposedly ageless while in posession of the ring. I believe Gollum supposedly aged after losing the ring but IIRC, LoTR didn't really go into that in the movies so no need to make Gollum appear any different in the prequel?
On the other hand, I knew an old hardware hacker running a small computer shop in rural NC... customers would bring in failed drives, if he could determine the failure was on the controller, he would find a spare drive with the same model number and swap out the controllers - revived the drive with data intact.
Not sure if it's possible / easy to do that with these particular drives, but it's worth looking into...
Its already been slashdotted.
I highly doubt that it's slashdotted... far more likely it's SLdotted - SL's website is never that fast anyways, and can crash / become unusable from load related problems completely and totally unrelated to slashdot, in my experience...
An intruder gained access to the database . So they're resetting passwords. Good.
... which is also probally in the same database that was already compromised?
But they're using the "security question"
ironically, I just got done going through the process when I decided to check slashdot lol.
In order to load the security question you have to click on a link with a UUID in an e-mail to your registered address - the attacker would have to have access to your e-mail as well.
Also I would note that the attacker got encrypted passwords - no word on how strong the encryption was, but there's at least even money he can't read them anyways.
If you did, then you should really realize that neither CGI nor J2EE are scripting languages... assuming you have half a developer.brain.
Technically, neither is ASP.NET, it being compiled to IL in much the same way Java is compiled to bytecode (and with similar server container object models, as well). But the point wasn't to nitpick the finer points of technical naming of strange and varied runtimes - the point was to voice my opinion about the relative merits of these choices, particularly with regards to the type of tool being discussed.
Uh-huh. You've tried them all? Really?
Yeap. There are current J2EE production sites with large userbases that I wrote. We used to run some internal company apps on PHP but found the environment cumbersome and primitive. Perl's a requirement for any unix hacker, and while I've never written a website in it, nor would I want to. My first ever web server was a straight CGI doing 3D image rendering on request. And, this is the point of my previous post, after honestly giving many of the more popular options their chance, given the choice, I'll take Expressions and ASP.NET against any of the alternatives without hesitation or equivocation, and therefore I don't really care if Expressions Web Designer supports any other technologies or not...
So why does Dreamweaver support anything except ColdFusion?
That's what they chose to do with their tool - and its worked to them. They wanted to build a good development tool allowing designers to pick up one skillset that would allow them to be productive in a variety of environments. Their tool was built with the idea of becoming the tool that designers would prefer to use and learn - and is wildly succesful for it.
Microsoft does not want to compete with Dreamweaver. Frontpage and Interdev convinced them they would fail miserably at it. Instead they wanted to focus on their core competency and build a tool far better than any competitor could for their development environment. They succeeded, and as someone who uses their environment I'm very excited about it.
Go ahead use Dreamweaver, I'm glad you have it. I have the luxury of working for a consulting firm that also functions as a hosting provider so we can use a wholly Microsoft environment - and I'd wager the rich development tools we have now are better than the cross-platform analogues in the majority of cases. There are definitely instances where that isn't the case - Erwin is a clear example of a data modeller better than anything in the Microsoft toolset. This is one case where that was the case and isn't anymore, and I can't say I'm too upset about that...
Did you really expect Microsoft to build a Web Designer that didn't target their platform? Expressions is part of Visual Studio - it was unveiled at Professional Developers Conference 2005. Of course it's going to target ASP.NET - that's the web development language for Visual Studio .NET.
What I don't understand is why anyone would think they would do anything different? You may think the "right" way to make software like this is to target multiple platforms - but that doesn't make it the right way. Microsoft does not build software that way. Arguably they have proven that their way is more "right" - by the Heinlein test that it is the way that is most succesful. They've built a multinational corporate entity, producing software that runs the vast majority of the world's computing equipment, and they built this empire by writing software that was meant to work well together - and didn't really care how well it worked with other software.
They've made great strides in this area lately, showing a willingness to support alternative standards and open specifications, and even recognizing that interoperability is a value proposition to their customers - but I think it's idealistic dreaming at best to hope they would build a development tool for a competing platform.
I don't do PHP, Perl, CGI, J2EE or any of the "slashdot-approved" server-side scripting languages. I don't really care if my development environment supports any of them. I've tried them all, and had paying customers for most, and honestly prefer ASP.NET. I'm not trying to start an argument about which is better - merely stating my opinion. As such, Expressions is the perfect web designer for me, and I don't think anyone doing ASP.NET development would argue with that, if all you want to do in the world is ASP.NET development, then Expressions is clearly superior to any 3rd party tool - and no secret why, Microsoft has the expertise in their own API, and most likely a deeper understanding than is available in public documentation.
hard drives are merely rotating discs or platters with a reading arm accessing them while they spin at high speeds. If something goes wrong, it grinds to a halt.
There is a second failure mode, though its far less common. It also, does not involve fire. It does involve high speed relatively high moment inertia platters and a catastrophic failure in the casing. The casing is pretty sturdy and resilient, but in some cases the only thing holding the top and bottom halves together is a screw and a bead of glue...
It was a far more common problem back when hard drives were washing-machine sized stacks of 12" platters - I heard tell of the devastation of one of those getting lose in a server room - sounds like it spun in place on the floor for a second before making a bee line to the wall, getting almost to the cieling, then flinging itself back into the room at large, had to redo the floor and walls of the whole room...
There's no way that Alaskan taxpayers would approve a tax increase for such a stupid cause
Unless of course Alaska doesn't have a state tax. Which it doesn't. Taxation on the oil pipeline provides so much revenue that it pays its residents! My brother claimed residency when he was stationed there (Operation Wolfpac for the curious) and got a nice check over and above the state taxes he paid every year!
I don't know where this money should come from or what the budgets look like - just wanted to point out that Alaska is in a unique (and enviable) position when it comes to state taxes...
Ok on the particular solution you're mentioning... tarballs could be your friend, you can create them with most any compression software, and most compression software understands disc spanning. Likewise, even more compression software can read tarballs, and you can grab individual files out of it. Tarballs are compressionless file archives, and therefore use little CPU to create - they are I/O bound, best situation you can get assuming your hard drive is an order of magnitude or so faster than the DVD burner...
Anyways, as others have pointed out, there are good solutions out there better than DVD. For instance, DVD isn't very useful for archiving high quality video. Nor is it that convenient for backing up program files - the largest of which can themselves be installed through multiple DVDs in some cases. Tape is good, a bit more expensive than DVD per media unit, but if you compare the math you'll see that it's quite a bit better per gigabyte, depending on your solution. You might complain that tape robots are too expensive, and you want a nice automated solution - and I'd agree, the prices on those things is outrageous... but its not going to be a more tedious process without one than swapping a dozen DVDs through your drive. Especially since most tape drives have higher write speeds than DVD burners... total throughput is hard to compare, because with a very fast DVD drive, the time to swap discs becomes a significant part of the cycle.
Hard drive solutions are also convenient, if error prone. Honestly, I'd rather invest in an array of inexpensive discs - seriously go for the 80 GB bottom market drives, build a RAID 5 array, acquire a cheap RAID card (Promise has a good one that can be had for about $20), and build yourself an array. You want redundancy, put more drives in it. Keep one or two spares on hand, and never have to worry about losing data while you're waiting for one to be shipped. I'll bet it'll be tons more reliable than a USB hard drive solution in the long run.
DVDs and tapes are both subject to long term storage problems, with long term storage problems - look up DVD rot, and tapes are subject to magnetic and cosmic ray damage in long term storage. Magnetic safes and faraday cages can help, but a bad tape solution can cause a failure rate close to 50% in some cases. No matter how resilient a hard drive solution you choose, it will have a life expentency measured in years, not decades.
Some say the long term solution is to continue reinvesting in your archives, upgrading the technology and transferring the data whenever required. That might in fact be the best solution - the only long term storage I would trust would be hermetically sealed optical media, and the best density I'm aware of there is HDMD at 1GB per disc - not exactly practical for an archival solution - though I must say I've put in comparable hours recording on MD as an audio technician and transferring tracks to and from my digital studio. A better solution if the budget is unlimited would be holographic media - these are almost universally caddied to protect the sensitive interference pattern, and available in insanely high densities. But this is supposed to be about the home user - expect a holographic media solution to cost more than a small car.
My suggestion throughout all this ramble? Use the RAID 5 array and backup sensitive data to something you can archive. Use tapes if you can, if not DVDs can do the job though it'll be tedious. Either way, get the right software to do the job, don't be squeamish if you have to use some compression, you'll generally still be I/O bound anyways so it won't chew your CPU up. Put the important stuff in a metal safe - offsite if you can arrange it - possibly with tiered backup - make two copies of your monthly fulls, ship one offsite, keep your weekly diffs in a safe, something of that nature. Use a rotating schedule of tapes and run the verifications - it's important to make sure your tapes aren't wearing out, that you can rely on them. Ditto with DVDs, take the extra time at burn time to verify them.
Under Windows it seems it'll swap out whether the free RAM is needed or not
That's correct - the pagefile in Windows is a direct memory map with a dirty write cache, it is always being updated to reflect currently running processes, and there's a mapper behind the scenes that maps pagefile space to physical addresses. Swapping is done by simply unallocating the memory from the pagefile, when it's needed it's paged back in.
Fundamentally, for Windows to operate well, your pagefile should be larger than your physical memory by some amount. I personally on a 2GB system would set it to memory and set autogrowth on - you'll probably never need it, but if you, you've given Windows an escape option to continue running...
It's very inefficient, but supports among other things complete bluescreen debugging, because the entire state of the machine is theoretically on disk after system recovery...
I personally agree with the Linux model - just use the swap when you need it, don't weigh down my drive with useless chatter.