The leaders are Veritas's NetBackup and IBM's TSM. Not that I'm endorsing either...however, having used all three, I'd pick either NBU or TSM over Legato every time.
I agree that Legato is best avoided - in gereral, it leaves a trail of dead bodies behind it...
As far as cpommercial b/u software goes, BakBone's NetVault is a far better (both in functionality and price) option than either Veritas (good but $$$) or TSM (a true power tool, also $$$, but also requiring *way* too much arcane knowledge about its internals to run and effectively.)
Nope, you didn't miss anything as SCP has no incremental option. You could work around that by using a data compression tool to create an archive of just the files that have been changed, then SCPing that and uncompressing over the data mirror on the remote server. That doesn't help much if part of your data set is a big database file of which only a couple of records have changed though.
A far better option would be Unison, which does 90% of what you're looking for, and can be made to work across an SSH tunnel. (Although, as always with SSH tunnels, the setup is a PITA.)
> on Linux there's no practical way to get the OS > not to access the drive at least a few times per > minute. It would be nice if there were.
Of course there is a way. It's called laptop_mode kernel patch and 2.6 kernel has it (also, the 2.4 kernel from fedora 1, has it). If you have that, then you mess a little with/proc/sys/vm/bdflush and with hdparm you set the drive to spin down every 20 seconds or so and you are ready to go!
And the/. crowd wonders why ordinary computer users won't run Linux as a desktop/laptop OS...
Wow, I'm shocked no one has got it yet. The show was called "Max Headroom" - Not the British talkshow, but the sci-fi series that survived for only a season on ABC. (The story was invented as an attempt to explain the origins of talkshow host/VJ MattFrewer as Max Headroom.)
The title came from extracting the last image that good-guy reporter Edison Carter saw before crashing his motorcycle while avoiding murderous network thugs. That last image/memory, as he was literally flying through the parking garage, was this sign: "Max Headroom 2.3m"
This set of memories were then wrapped up with an AI program of Network 23's kid hacker-genius Bryce Lynch to form the sentient, sarcastic, and hilarious "Max Headroom".
It really was one of the greatest sci-fi shows ever done (but then I think most SciFi shows are absolute tripe), and *way* too close to the truth for the networks to allow it to survive. (The subtitle/setting "20 minutes into the future" was both intriguing and insightful...) One can only wonder what would have happened had the show lived a bit longer.
Oh, come on. Do you really believe that the bloated piece of junk known as Netscape 4 was somehow better than IE4?
I don't just believe it, I *know* it. I was Software Program Manager half of Dell's brands when MS forced the not-ready-for-prime-time IE4 on the market so they could get it in place as "an integrated part of the OS" before the DoJ could stop them. IE4 is and was unquestionably one of the lowest-quality pieces of code ever to be publicly released, and if you had any idea how bad we knew it really was, you'd be shocked. (In fact, it was ethical problems like this that led me to leave the company after I was ordered to ship code that was *known* to corrupt hard disks.)
NN4 had warts, to be sure, but was *clearly* better than IE4. You've got to remember, most people think of IE as the later versions, and even those thinking of IE4 forget that there were dozens of huge "updates" that more or less totally replaced the original IE4 (along with ripping up and replacing huge chunks of the Win9x operating systems, too.) In reality, IE4 was an unmitigated pile of crap. A very pretty pile of crap, maybe, but that's all. (Remember, the chief goals of IE4 were to establish it as the dominant browser through OEM bundling (thus killing Netscape and non-poisoned Java as alternative application platforms), and to kill PointCast and other "push" thechnologies via Active Desktop. It succeeded marvelously at both, setting the stage for later similar conquests by Media Player and its ilk.
It's popular to bash NN4 now, because it's still distressingly widely used and mangles web standards, but it I think you can make a legitimate claim that it was the best browser out there until IE5.5. There is no question that it was more functional and stable than IE4.
Even Mozilla is only just now starting to really get better than IE6, and IMO Firefox and Thunderbird still have a long way to go - Firefox is an impressive start, but only supports a subset of the functionality of either Mozilla or IE. I say that as someone who has been in the Netscape/Mozilla camp through the entire battle - I have never used IE as my primary browser for more than two weeks at a time, since real bookmarks support is too important.
(Bookmark management was area where NN4 really shined - it's bookmarks support was the best ever in any browser: even Mozilla/NS6/7 are missing important bookmarks functionality that was in the old Navigator code. Don't believe me? Try this: With a non-trivial bookmarks file using multiple levels of folders, search for a bookmark. Now tell me which folder it was found in: There is NO WAY to get that information in Mozilla-based browsers, but it was easily visible in a tree-viewer in the old NN3/4. There are many more similar botches in Mozilla-based bookmarks code, but it's still somewhat better than IE's hamstrung "Favorites".)
Not all that's new is better - IMO, Mozilla has just finally caught up with where it should have been years ago - and we're still missing things like SVG support or any reasonable way to search e-mail messages other than having to re-do searches to look in multiple files or mail servers. Let's hope we finally get 2000-worthy browsers by 2006 or so...
I never saw Wild Wild West (some movies are obviously losers and don't need to be proven so), but the idea of image recovery from the "dead" guy was a key component in one of the greatest biting satire/sci-fi movie/series ever produced. (I have little doubt it was killed not for low ratings, but because it was *way* too close to the truth for the network bosses...)
Other hints: The title of the series is also the name of one of the title characters, and that name was extracted from the brain image of the last thing seen by his "twin" character.
No, I'm not going to tell you the name of the show, but when you figure it out, go rent both the movie and every episode you can find - it's worth it.
The monkey has mutated, supposedly. Now all that has to happen is for another one to mutate in exactly the same fashion, and for the two to mate and produce offspring.
No, even that ridiculously unlikey set of circumstances couldn't begin to do it. The monkey is simply brain-damaged, not "mutated" - there has been no change in its genetic code as a result of the injury. The real problem is that inheritance of traits like bipedal walking relies entirely on something that evolutionists *know* to be false: Lamarckian inheritance. (Lamarckian inheritance is the idea that acquired traits can be inherited by offspring.) Lamarckian inheritance is vital to attempt to explain things like instict and inheritance of somatic mutations in an organism. The problem is that all the available scientific evidence proves it to be false - acquired characteristics are emphatically NOT inherited, nor is there any scientific reason to believe they can be. Evolutionists are far too seldom called on their "Just-So" stories (like this one) involving inheritance of acquired characteristics.
In order for a trait to be inherited, the genetic code for that trait must be present in the sex cells that determine the genetic code of the offspring, not just the somatic (body) cells. Lamarckian inheritance cannot propose even a far-reaching porpositoin of how this might happen, but the entire theory of evolution hinges on the truth of this known un-truth.
This is one area where science is emphatically against evolution - Anyone believing such a ridiculous proposition would be forced to accept Kipling's real "Just-So" stories of "How the Elephant got his trunk" or "How the Leopard got his Spots" as scientific fact. (After all, it's only logical that Elephants have a long nose just because his one once got too close to the bank of the river and a Crocodile pulled on it - of course the Elephant's children would have long noses, too, right?)
(See Science Against Evolution for more information on why science itself argues against evolution and its Just-So stories and other fairy tales.)
MOAPI expounds on the idea that immortality and absolute control of reality somehow leads to a nebulous feeling of emptiness and futility leading to self-destructive decadence. Humans are animals, but MOAPI assumes they become internally neutral gods over an eternity...which is plain dumb.
A more thorought treatment of this idea and its implications can be found in C.S. Lewis' book, That Hideous Strength. I just finished reading it, and it's a truly bizarre book - officially it's the last book in his "Space Trilogy", but different enough from the other two that it can stand on its own. In some ways the questionable goals of even more questionable organizations that he wrote about in 1945 ring even truer today.
At the same time, it makes some very insightful analyses of the logical conclusion one reaches it one takes humanist materialism to its logical conclusion. Worth a read, especially if you're at al lintersted in exploring these issues...
It might just be that the cost of supporting IE+Mozilla/Firefox could be less than supporting IE!
Which then leads naturally one to consider whether moving all users to Mozilla/Firefox might lead to even greater savings.
This is just anti-IE bigotry. I just spent nearly the whole day tracking down a very nasty XUL/RDF incompatibility in Tab Browser Extensions that totally paralyzed the new Mozilla 1.7. That sort of thing is NOT easier and cheaper, and in fact, finding and fixing such problems requires a degree of knowledge that is NOT found on most tech support desks.
I love Mozilla - I've used nothing but Mozilla and Netscape as my primary browser since I first saw the amazing feat of inline images in Netscape in 1993 - but it has its warts, too. It's foolish to think that support issues will go away by waving a magic Mozilla wand.
(My guess is that today, despite all of IE's shortcomings, support costs might actually be *higher* for Mozilla because of the number of sites coded to require IE and it's bugs and quirks. That doesn't mean IE is a better browser - it's clearly not better at much other than being a virus hose, but it may actually be cheaper to support in many circumstances in today's world.)
"more", in its "standard" *NIX form, is forward-scroll only, among many other limitations.
Regular "more" does have the ablity to go backwards, just by hitting the "b" key. I'm pretty sure this feature is nearly as old as the hills, since I *think* I remember using it as far back as Version 7. (*that* dates me some...) I'm sure more has behaved that way in SunOS and Solaris for many years, anyway.
shell+awk+sed+grep is barely in the same category as Perl4 and not nearly as useful (for admin stuff, I mean) as Perl5
Translation: I don't know to use shell+awk+sed+grep effectively, and I am unwilling to learn another tool, so therefore they must suck.
Amen, brother. I havea personal distaste for Perl, but that's irrelevant. What *is* relevant is that I've got dozens of admin shell scripts based on the standard Unix text utilities that still run with little or no modification on virtually any machine I drop them on. Over the years they've approached a generic zenith that ensures they even work on Linux (seriously, the gratuitous GNU syntax changes introduced some of the worst incompatibilities...) I can carry these with me anywhere and run them on almost anything, even PCs, with pretty much any unix-esque shell and text tools environment.
Not only are they far more portable and long-lasting than Perl, but installing a Unix shell environment is usually *far* easier than trying to get Perl all installed and properly running, especially on a system you're not familiar with. (Granted, this has gotten easier in the last few years thanks to ActiveState and the like, but if you're going to go to all that trouble, why not go all the way to Python? (see below))
Lastly, shell scripts are still quite intelligible years later, is very *unlike* Perl code, which is best considered a "write-only" language for the purposes of systems administration. This is true even for very gifted programmers, like Eric Raymond, who began to favor Python over Perl explicitly *because* he could not read Perl code he had written more than a few days ago:
These problems combined to make large volumes of Perl code seem unreasonably difficult to read and grasp as a whole after only a few days' absence. Also, I found I was spending more and more time wrestling with artifacts of the language rather than my application problems. And, most damning of all, the resulting code was ugly--this matters. Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.
If fuel economy was all that much a selling point, SUVs and pickups would have remained specialty vehicles, observed mostly at worksites and in remote areas.
SUVs are the huge hit they are in the market precisely *because* the meddling legislative weenies managed to outlaw the big cars Americans *want*. If we still had decent-sized cars (today's full-size cars are smaller than mid-size cars of 25-30 years ago), it's unlikely that the "National Car of Texas" would have become the national car of the entire US.
You have to laugh at the liberals here - they love to demonize SUVs, but the entire "SUV problem" is one of thier own making. Americans will not (and should not) give up the safety, comfort, and utility benefits of a large vehicle just because a bunch of effete Europeans use their socialist governments to force tiny little crapboxes on their citizenry.
Allowing the automakers to actually build *big cars* would eliminate the hoops that have to jumped through today, and would no doubt increase the efficiency of the US auto fleet. (Except for those of us in Texas - we'll give up our Suburbans, Expeditions, and King Ranch F150s on the 12th of Never. Texas really should be it's own country again, anyway...)
Although hydrogen is essentially everywhere, you can't just dig it out of the ground.
Actually, the *only* way hydrogen can be economically produced today is *exactly* to "dig it out of the ground" in the form of natural gas. (The vast majority of the world's hydrogen is produced this way, for the very simple reason that there is no other way that is even remotely as cost effective.)
The problem with hydrogen of course, is that it's the most reactive element on the planet, and so it has this distressing tendency to be bound up in extremely stable compounds like water that require an inordinate amount of energy to rip apart again. Reforming Methane (natural gas) into hydrogen is not easy, but it's one heck of a lot easier (from both an energy and large-scale technology point of view) than tearing apart water molucules.
The funniest thing about all the hydrogen bigots out there is that they think they're agitating against the big oil companies. In reality, you could scarecely envision an energy scenario that would more firmly cement the dominance of the oil companies than the rise of a "hydrogen economy". Remember, hydrogen is not an energy *source*, it's just an energy *storage* method - Kind of like batteries, but high-pressure, even less efficient (end-to-end), and with vastly superior incendiary capabilities.
I don't claim to know what the answer is just yet, but the evidence is pretty darn conclusive that it's NOT hydrogen.
Re:My Win desktop already runs *nix code...
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Unix To Beef Up Longhorn
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I would love to run SFU, since it's no doubt far more stable and reliable than Cygwin, with which I've had no end of problems over the years. Unfortunately, Microsoft forces you to sign up for thier execrable Passport ID "service" before you can download SFU, so it looks like many potential users will never even get to try it.
It *would* be nice to have a *real* functional Unix layer for XP - right now, the closest thing I've seen is David Korn's U/Win: At least U/Win's real Korn shell (ksh) can at least correctly perform basic math operations, unlike Cygwin's bash. Still, U/Win lacks even basic integration - the Interix-based SFU solution should be far superior, blending real Unix capabilities natively into XP. (I haven't seen or used SFU in five years, but it worked nearly as well as MKS toolkit at that time, which is to say, pretty well.)
Why MS didn't include SFU as a standard part of Windows from Win2K on is beyond me...
I mean, we really seem to live in a world these days that's an endless legion of assholes...
People tell me it's the result of free speech and free expression and the tossing of old ways, but that doesn't do much to mitigate the fact that we live immersed in an endless legion of assholes.
(I generally refrain from using language like this in posts, but in this case, I find no suitable alternative to "asshole" to succintly describe a person of that character, so here goes...)
No, you're right about the endless legion of assholes. On this occasion of the 200th anniversary of the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton we should consider that perhaps bringing back dueling would be a really good idea - the "asshole quotient" would fall precipitously if dueling were reinstated, for several reasons:
First, assholes would (almost by definition) get into duels at far higher rates than normal folks. Even if you presume they attempt to preserve themselves by superior preparation, the odds are against them over the long haul, so the asshole population falls, and polite manners once again reasssert themselves in civilized society.
Second, the smarter and more clueful assholes would begin to actually change thier behavior, staying a bit back from the line of offense that would be grounds for demanding satisfaction in defense of one's honor on the field of battle.
Third, this would affect far more than just the behavior of assholes - eventually, people would once again begin to speak with greater regard for the truth. Let's face it - how long would Michael Moore last in a world where each of the dozens of lies in his new film could lead to a duel?
In an odd way, then, dueling may be anything but regressive and primitive - it is in fact, a key component to an honest, polite, and civilized society, where people are truly held accountable for their words and their actions by the society itself...
Because the telephone is useless. Nobody actually answers the phone any more. Ever try to conduct business by phone? It is absolutely impossible.
Despite the current trendiness of e-mail and other more "modern" communications methods, there's no question that the phone is used to conduct *far* more real business than all computer-based methods combined.
Phone calls are *the* preferred way of doing business by those actually *doing* business - making contacts, forging relationships, doing deals, signing contracts, etc.
And, oh, by the way, when things get to that contract-signing point, e-mail still isn't used - another "old-style" electronic communications technology, called fax, gets the nod at that point - seems the courts have no problem with faxed signatures, but do not recognize fancy electronic cryptosigs.
(BTW: E-week this week had an interesting article about more and more companies deemphasizing or even abandoning e-mail due to the cost and time lost to dealing with spam and virus epidemics. I think they're on to something - there's a very real backlash brewing against e-mail, IM, and their ilk, and phone and fax are the logical winners in that case.)
In the 128 years since its invention, no one's written a virus that can infect my 1940's-vintage desk phone. It works flawlessly to talk to any other telephone in the world. It even fully supports *all* present and future spoken languages *without* re-flashing the firmware to install a service pack!
You obviously don't like the phone, but in the real world, I'll take a phone over a computer any day - even to run a computer-oriented business like the one I actually do run! (Not to mention that laws against telemarketers are quite effective, while everyone realizes that such laws against spam cannot be enforced and so should not even be tried, as the FCC and FTC recently decided...)
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i
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eFax Hell?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So I'm going to go against your decision that this was the customer's fault for not closely monitoring a format change. I believe that it's partially eFax's fault for not coding their service against a common and catostophic client error.
No, eFax's software did *exactly* what it is supposed to do. It is *designed* to accept text input as well as PDF, but not PostScript. This is not a bug, but a feature - you can very easily send faxes just by generating a regular ASCII text file. The PostScript output is one big, honking, ugly text file, which eFax's software sent exactly as the careless poster asked it to...
I know of several IT shops that will not allow non Cisco equipment into their infrastructure. Would make it hard (if not impossible) to qualify for those accounts.
Cisco is good, but they're by no means in a class all their own from a performance or capability point of view. Personally, I've found Extreme Networks can often offer considerably higher performance at a price that's a bit lower than Cisco's - and the care and feeding of Extreme's gear is *way* easier than Cisco's, too, which is a cost that you should NOT ignore...
I have nothing against Cisco, but Extreme "gets" performance far more than Cisco - for instance, Extreme's gigabit switches have deeper buffers than Cisco's which is irrelevant for most networking tasks, but shows up big-time when you try to do something serious like, say, storage-over-IP, or a cable head-end: it's just way too easy to overrun Cisco's buffers and wind up with your data all over the floor. Of course, if you ever have to retransmit anything because of this, the huge latency involved in that obliterates any chance of good performance. Extreme's engineers know this, and design their gear accordingly.
I'd suggest giving them a chance as an alternative vendor. (I have no relationship with Extreme, either, except as one pleasantly surprised by the company on several occasions.)
Now consider that higher-end motherboards now have more than one PCI bus that can run at this speed, and a PC can make a very good alternative to a router. Again, the key is the software...
Not entirely. Host-based routing is undoubtedly more do-able now than it was a few years ago, since Moore's law is finally delivering hardware that's "fast enough" for most such applications.
The real problems aren't all in the software either. Linux in particular has serious performance problems in such applications. I'm not Linux-bashing here, it's just fact: If you want to do serious host-based network processing, you'll find that only Sun and IBM can really keep up with wire speeds.
There are two reasons for this: First, the superior networking performance of those OSes (which is why *really* big firewalls like the one NASA uses to move *all* of its satellite tlemetry through always run on big IAX boxes); and Second, their markedly superior internal bus architectures. Almost all non-IBM x86 boxes have serious choke points in their buses or buscontrollers. (Seriously, check out the way IBM's x-series servers provide higher I/O cpacities, and you'll realize that if you're planning to really the crank I/O, Dell and HPaq aren't even in this game.
Then, of course, there is the application software, which you correctly point out is often hard to come by (except commercially).
Finally, pay attention to the NICs - they are definitely NOT all created equal. In general, the 3Coms, Intels, and such are trash from a serious performance point of view, and you're generally *way* better off with something designed by a company that haas a clue about protocol and system i/o performance, like Syskonnect.
If you do your homework correctly, you can build a host-based router that will do the job in most cases, but it isn't easy. Especially if you're pushing the limits and don't have the serious multidisciplinary skills required to pull off putting together such a system (I'd estimate fewer than 1 sysadmin in 500 does), you're better off staying with the canned router solutions...
Wow, it sounds like you think its unpatriotic to release code under a license that doesn't restrict uses to the US.
How might things have turned out differently if those foreigners that started the Linux kernel, Mysql, OpenBSD, Python, Ruby, KDE, Mplayer, etc had said the same thing about letting American's profit off of their software.
There's a *huge* difference in individual developers (or loosely coupled groups of them) releasing open source software and a monstrous entity like the US government doing the same.
In the case of software developed on behalf of US taxpayers and at thier expense, though, the Government has a fiduciary (trust) responsibility to safeguard the investment of those taxpayers. (As the late Ronald Reagan famously said, "it's not Washington's money!")
Perhaps that means that some software developed at US taxpayer expense *should* be licensed in such a way that it benefits those that paid for it more than those that did not?
[What]is wrong with making a zipfile and then encrypting it with PGP? The only reasons to put encryption in Winzip itself are fairly bogus arguments about convenience, and the chance to charge more money for a product that does more (even if it does it badly).
Well, let's see - after you've encrypted that Zip file with PGP, you'll be able to exchange it with all of the 0.0001% of the people in the wolrd who have heard of PGP and are willing to put up with the it. (That figure's probably not far off: As evidenced by their actual usage, the vast majority of IT professionals refuse to put up with the pains of PGP/GPG, and they're only a tiny fraction of the world's PC users.
There are decent solutions out there - But even the best tools available, things like AxCrypt, which can be used to encrypt/decrypt any file on the fly are still considerably more of a pain than not using encryption. Encryption is not a panacea, and won't be widely used until it's totally transparently hidden by the OS.
Arguments about convenience are not bogus: they are in fact probably the most valid arguments involved in any sort of security system discussion, since history has proven time and again that users *will* turn off or otherwise render useless any security they find to be obnoxious...
All the comments for them were seething with loathing for John Katz. I remember thinking, "Who is this guy, and why does everyone hate him so much?"
Jon Who? Oh, yeah, that overbearing twerp who not only coudn't write, but felt he had to force his social aganda down everyone's throat in a totally inappropriate forum. I never did figure out why the editors kept the guy (at least at first, later on, they kept him because the outcry generated traffic and page hits.)
In those days, there really wasn't much advantage to being a registered poster, and some of us posted for years as ACs before bothering to register. There were two reasons that finally drove me to register: AC posts began to be treated as second-class, and it was possible to completely filter out things by John Katz, who by that time had proven to me beyond all doubt that I would never care to read anything he wrote...
So do we even really have choice? If not, then why does this plan that God has made us all players in have such a crappy script? What's the point of it all?
I know it will come as quite a shock to the/. crowd, which thingks they know everything and that any knowledge more than a year old is irrelevant, but this question has been well and capably thought out and debated already. This issue, in fact, is one of the large issues that split the Protestant church after the Reformation. (BTW - everyone really should read and learn about the Reformation - it's quite certainly the most important and influential event of the past 1000 years.)
The issue of "Free Will" has been debated for years, with Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Wesleyans (Methodists) taking markedly different views. Personally, I think the Prebyterian doctrine of predestination makes the most sense (it is certainly the most logically consistent, although it *is* quite uncomfortable in many ways.) This doctrine is largely misunderstood, even by many who call themselves Presbyterians - you really need to read the writings of the Reformers themselves to get a good handle on the issue. If you're looking for a good, relatively easy starting place, try the Westminster Confession of Faith. If you're up for more intellectual challenge, check out Systematic Theology works by Van Til or the various works of Francis Schaeffer.
Christianity is by far the most intellectually challenging and rewarding thing I've ever been involved with. Don't sell it short before learning more - this life is *supposed* to be a search for the Truth. Things become much clearer when you realize that, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever."
It is also worth remembering that much of what did survive out of the destruction of classical learning was eventually preserved and re-transmitted to a deeply ignorant and religiously hidebound Europe several hundred years later through the hands of the relatively liberal and learned muslim arabs...
Your bigotry is showing.
There is no doubt that learning was lost after the fall of Rome. Knowledge was preserved through intervening centuries in several unlikely places far afield. Before you blast the Christians for this, perhaps you should know that much of the ancient knowledge that was saved was in fact preserved by the chirch itself. This included much from Arab and other eastern sources that was lost even in the east when the far-from-civilized Mohammedans deliberately destroyed anything they judged heretical, which by definition is pretty much anything other than the Koran and the Hadith.)
You might want to read How the Irish Saved Civilization to get an understanding of how the church in Irelend was actually instrumental in maintaining a library of this information through the turbulent times of the incorrectly-named "dark ages", and then re-seeding that information throughout Europe. A good book, worth a read...
Slashdot Mirror
The leaders are Veritas's NetBackup and IBM's TSM. Not that I'm endorsing either...however, having used all three, I'd pick either NBU or TSM over Legato every time.
I agree that Legato is best avoided - in gereral, it leaves a trail of dead bodies behind it...
As far as cpommercial b/u software goes, BakBone's NetVault is a far better (both in functionality and price) option than either Veritas (good but $$$) or TSM (a true power tool, also $$$, but also requiring *way* too much arcane knowledge about its internals to run and effectively.)
Nope, you didn't miss anything as SCP has no incremental option. You could work around that by using a data compression tool to create an archive of just the files that have been changed, then SCPing that and uncompressing over the data mirror on the remote server. That doesn't help much if part of your data set is a big database file of which only a couple of records have changed though.
A far better option would be Unison, which does 90% of what you're looking for, and can be made to work across an SSH tunnel. (Although, as always with SSH tunnels, the setup is a PITA.)
No need to excuse yourself; those are both extremely excellent movies, and I don't even have nor want kids!
Then you're missing out on the most rewarding experience in life. Begin by thinking of the fun in training a 10-billion-neuron neural net...
> on Linux there's no practical way to get the OS
/proc/sys/vm/bdflush and with hdparm you set the drive to spin down every 20 seconds or so and you are ready to go!
/. crowd wonders why ordinary computer users won't run Linux as a desktop/laptop OS...
> not to access the drive at least a few times per
> minute. It would be nice if there were.
Of course there is a way. It's called laptop_mode kernel patch and 2.6 kernel has it (also, the 2.4 kernel from fedora 1, has it). If you have that, then you mess a little with
And the
Wow, I'm shocked no one has got it yet. The show was called "Max Headroom" - Not the British talkshow, but the sci-fi series that survived for only a season on ABC. (The story was invented as an attempt to explain the origins of talkshow host/VJ MattFrewer as Max Headroom.)
The title came from extracting the last image that good-guy reporter Edison Carter saw before crashing his motorcycle while avoiding murderous network thugs. That last image/memory, as he was literally flying through the parking garage, was this sign: "Max Headroom 2.3m"
This set of memories were then wrapped up with an AI program of Network 23's kid hacker-genius Bryce Lynch to form the sentient, sarcastic, and hilarious "Max Headroom".
It really was one of the greatest sci-fi shows ever done (but then I think most SciFi shows are absolute tripe), and *way* too close to the truth for the networks to allow it to survive. (The subtitle/setting "20 minutes into the future" was both intriguing and insightful...) One can only wonder what would have happened had the show lived a bit longer.
Oh, come on. Do you really believe that the bloated piece of junk known as Netscape 4 was somehow better than IE4?
I don't just believe it, I *know* it. I was Software Program Manager half of Dell's brands when MS forced the not-ready-for-prime-time IE4 on the market so they could get it in place as "an integrated part of the OS" before the DoJ could stop them. IE4 is and was unquestionably one of the lowest-quality pieces of code ever to be publicly released, and if you had any idea how bad we knew it really was, you'd be shocked. (In fact, it was ethical problems like this that led me to leave the company after I was ordered to ship code that was *known* to corrupt hard disks.)
NN4 had warts, to be sure, but was *clearly* better than IE4. You've got to remember, most people think of IE as the later versions, and even those thinking of IE4 forget that there were dozens of huge "updates" that more or less totally replaced the original IE4 (along with ripping up and replacing huge chunks of the Win9x operating systems, too.) In reality, IE4 was an unmitigated pile of crap. A very pretty pile of crap, maybe, but that's all. (Remember, the chief goals of IE4 were to establish it as the dominant browser through OEM bundling (thus killing Netscape and non-poisoned Java as alternative application platforms), and to kill PointCast and other "push" thechnologies via Active Desktop. It succeeded marvelously at both, setting the stage for later similar conquests by Media Player and its ilk.
It's popular to bash NN4 now, because it's still distressingly widely used and mangles web standards, but it I think you can make a legitimate claim that it was the best browser out there until IE5.5. There is no question that it was more functional and stable than IE4.
Even Mozilla is only just now starting to really get better than IE6, and IMO Firefox and Thunderbird still have a long way to go - Firefox is an impressive start, but only supports a subset of the functionality of either Mozilla or IE. I say that as someone who has been in the Netscape/Mozilla camp through the entire battle - I have never used IE as my primary browser for more than two weeks at a time, since real bookmarks support is too important.
(Bookmark management was area where NN4 really shined - it's bookmarks support was the best ever in any browser: even Mozilla/NS6/7 are missing important bookmarks functionality that was in the old Navigator code. Don't believe me? Try this: With a non-trivial bookmarks file using multiple levels of folders, search for a bookmark. Now tell me which folder it was found in: There is NO WAY to get that information in Mozilla-based browsers, but it was easily visible in a tree-viewer in the old NN3/4. There are many more similar botches in Mozilla-based bookmarks code, but it's still somewhat better than IE's hamstrung "Favorites".)
Not all that's new is better - IMO, Mozilla has just finally caught up with where it should have been years ago - and we're still missing things like SVG support or any reasonable way to search e-mail messages other than having to re-do searches to look in multiple files or mail servers. Let's hope we finally get 2000-worthy browsers by 2006 or so...
I never saw Wild Wild West (some movies are obviously losers and don't need to be proven so), but the idea of image recovery from the "dead" guy was a key component in one of the greatest biting satire/sci-fi movie/series ever produced. (I have little doubt it was killed not for low ratings, but because it was *way* too close to the truth for the network bosses...)
Other hints: The title of the series is also the name of one of the title characters, and that name was extracted from the brain image of the last thing seen by his "twin" character.
No, I'm not going to tell you the name of the show, but when you figure it out, go rent both the movie and every episode you can find - it's worth it.
The monkey has mutated, supposedly. Now all that has to happen is for another one to mutate in exactly the same fashion, and for the two to mate and produce offspring.
No, even that ridiculously unlikey set of circumstances couldn't begin to do it. The monkey is simply brain-damaged, not "mutated" - there has been no change in its genetic code as a result of the injury. The real problem is that inheritance of traits like bipedal walking relies entirely on something that evolutionists *know* to be false: Lamarckian inheritance. (Lamarckian inheritance is the idea that acquired traits can be inherited by offspring.) Lamarckian inheritance is vital to attempt to explain things like instict and inheritance of somatic mutations in an organism. The problem is that all the available scientific evidence proves it to be false - acquired characteristics are emphatically NOT inherited, nor is there any scientific reason to believe they can be. Evolutionists are far too seldom called on their "Just-So" stories (like this one) involving inheritance of acquired characteristics.
In order for a trait to be inherited, the genetic code for that trait must be present in the sex cells that determine the genetic code of the offspring, not just the somatic (body) cells. Lamarckian inheritance cannot propose even a far-reaching porpositoin of how this might happen, but the entire theory of evolution hinges on the truth of this known un-truth.
This is one area where science is emphatically against evolution - Anyone believing such a ridiculous proposition would be forced to accept Kipling's real "Just-So" stories of "How the Elephant got his trunk" or "How the Leopard got his Spots" as scientific fact. (After all, it's only logical that Elephants have a long nose just because his one once got too close to the bank of the river and a Crocodile pulled on it - of course the Elephant's children would have long noses, too, right?)
(See Science Against Evolution for more information on why science itself argues against evolution and its Just-So stories and other fairy tales.)
MOAPI expounds on the idea that immortality and absolute control of reality somehow leads to a nebulous feeling of emptiness and futility leading to self-destructive decadence. Humans are animals, but MOAPI assumes they become internally neutral gods over an eternity...which is plain dumb.
A more thorought treatment of this idea and its implications can be found in C.S. Lewis' book, That Hideous Strength. I just finished reading it, and it's a truly bizarre book - officially it's the last book in his "Space Trilogy", but different enough from the other two that it can stand on its own. In some ways the questionable goals of even more questionable organizations that he wrote about in 1945 ring even truer today.
At the same time, it makes some very insightful analyses of the logical conclusion one reaches it one takes humanist materialism to its logical conclusion. Worth a read, especially if you're at al lintersted in exploring these issues...
It might just be that the cost of supporting IE+Mozilla/Firefox could be less than supporting IE!
Which then leads naturally one to consider whether moving all users to Mozilla/Firefox might lead to even greater savings.
This is just anti-IE bigotry. I just spent nearly the whole day tracking down a very nasty XUL/RDF incompatibility in Tab Browser Extensions that totally paralyzed the new Mozilla 1.7. That sort of thing is NOT easier and cheaper, and in fact, finding and fixing such problems requires a degree of knowledge that is NOT found on most tech support desks.
I love Mozilla - I've used nothing but Mozilla and Netscape as my primary browser since I first saw the amazing feat of inline images in Netscape in 1993 - but it has its warts, too. It's foolish to think that support issues will go away by waving a magic Mozilla wand.
(My guess is that today, despite all of IE's shortcomings, support costs might actually be *higher* for Mozilla because of the number of sites coded to require IE and it's bugs and quirks. That doesn't mean IE is a better browser - it's clearly not better at much other than being a virus hose, but it may actually be cheaper to support in many circumstances in today's world.)
"more", in its "standard" *NIX form, is forward-scroll only, among many other limitations.
Regular "more" does have the ablity to go backwards, just by hitting the "b" key. I'm pretty sure this feature is nearly as old as the hills, since I *think* I remember using it as far back as Version 7. (*that* dates me some...) I'm sure more has behaved that way in SunOS and Solaris for many years, anyway.
Translation: I don't know to use shell+awk+sed+grep effectively, and I am unwilling to learn another tool, so therefore they must suck.
Amen, brother. I havea personal distaste for Perl, but that's irrelevant. What *is* relevant is that I've got dozens of admin shell scripts based on the standard Unix text utilities that still run with little or no modification on virtually any machine I drop them on. Over the years they've approached a generic zenith that ensures they even work on Linux (seriously, the gratuitous GNU syntax changes introduced some of the worst incompatibilities...) I can carry these with me anywhere and run them on almost anything, even PCs, with pretty much any unix-esque shell and text tools environment.
Not only are they far more portable and long-lasting than Perl, but installing a Unix shell environment is usually *far* easier than trying to get Perl all installed and properly running, especially on a system you're not familiar with. (Granted, this has gotten easier in the last few years thanks to ActiveState and the like, but if you're going to go to all that trouble, why not go all the way to Python? (see below))
Lastly, shell scripts are still quite intelligible years later, is very *unlike* Perl code, which is best considered a "write-only" language for the purposes of systems administration. This is true even for very gifted programmers, like Eric Raymond, who began to favor Python over Perl explicitly *because* he could not read Perl code he had written more than a few days ago:From his LinuxJournal article
Why Python?
If fuel economy was all that much a selling point, SUVs and pickups would have remained specialty vehicles, observed mostly at worksites and in remote areas.
SUVs are the huge hit they are in the market precisely *because* the meddling legislative weenies managed to outlaw the big cars Americans *want*. If we still had decent-sized cars (today's full-size cars are smaller than mid-size cars of 25-30 years ago), it's unlikely that the "National Car of Texas" would have become the national car of the entire US.
You have to laugh at the liberals here - they love to demonize SUVs, but the entire "SUV problem" is one of thier own making. Americans will not (and should not) give up the safety, comfort, and utility benefits of a large vehicle just because a bunch of effete Europeans use their socialist governments to force tiny little crapboxes on their citizenry.
Allowing the automakers to actually build *big cars* would eliminate the hoops that have to jumped through today, and would no doubt increase the efficiency of the US auto fleet. (Except for those of us in Texas - we'll give up our Suburbans, Expeditions, and King Ranch F150s on the 12th of Never. Texas really should be it's own country again, anyway...)
Although hydrogen is essentially everywhere, you can't just dig it out of the ground.
Actually, the *only* way hydrogen can be economically produced today is *exactly* to "dig it out of the ground" in the form of natural gas. (The vast majority of the world's hydrogen is produced this way, for the very simple reason that there is no other way that is even remotely as cost effective.)
The problem with hydrogen of course, is that it's the most reactive element on the planet, and so it has this distressing tendency to be bound up in extremely stable compounds like water that require an inordinate amount of energy to rip apart again. Reforming Methane (natural gas) into hydrogen is not easy, but it's one heck of a lot easier (from both an energy and large-scale technology point of view) than tearing apart water molucules.
The funniest thing about all the hydrogen bigots out there is that they think they're agitating against the big oil companies. In reality, you could scarecely envision an energy scenario that would more firmly cement the dominance of the oil companies than the rise of a "hydrogen economy". Remember, hydrogen is not an energy *source*, it's just an energy *storage* method - Kind of like batteries, but high-pressure, even less efficient (end-to-end), and with vastly superior incendiary capabilities.
I don't claim to know what the answer is just yet, but the evidence is pretty darn conclusive that it's NOT hydrogen.
I would love to run SFU, since it's no doubt far more stable and reliable than Cygwin, with which I've had no end of problems over the years. Unfortunately, Microsoft forces you to sign up for thier execrable Passport ID "service" before you can download SFU, so it looks like many potential users will never even get to try it.
It *would* be nice to have a *real* functional Unix layer for XP - right now, the closest thing I've seen is David Korn's U/Win: At least U/Win's real Korn shell (ksh) can at least correctly perform basic math operations, unlike Cygwin's bash. Still, U/Win lacks even basic integration - the Interix-based SFU solution should be far superior, blending real Unix capabilities natively into XP. (I haven't seen or used SFU in five years, but it worked nearly as well as MKS toolkit at that time, which is to say, pretty well.)
Why MS didn't include SFU as a standard part of Windows from Win2K on is beyond me...
I mean, we really seem to live in a world these days that's an endless legion of assholes...
People tell me it's the result of free speech and free expression and the tossing of old ways, but that doesn't do much to mitigate the fact that we live immersed in an endless legion of assholes.
(I generally refrain from using language like this in posts, but in this case, I find no suitable alternative to "asshole" to succintly describe a person of that character, so here goes...)
No, you're right about the endless legion of assholes. On this occasion of the 200th anniversary of the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton we should consider that perhaps bringing back dueling would be a really good idea - the "asshole quotient" would fall precipitously if dueling were reinstated, for several reasons:
First, assholes would (almost by definition) get into duels at far higher rates than normal folks. Even if you presume they attempt to preserve themselves by superior preparation, the odds are against them over the long haul, so the asshole population falls, and polite manners once again reasssert themselves in civilized society.
Second, the smarter and more clueful assholes would begin to actually change thier behavior, staying a bit back from the line of offense that would be grounds for demanding satisfaction in defense of one's honor on the field of battle.
Third, this would affect far more than just the behavior of assholes - eventually, people would once again begin to speak with greater regard for the truth. Let's face it - how long would Michael Moore last in a world where each of the dozens of lies in his new film could lead to a duel?
In an odd way, then, dueling may be anything but regressive and primitive - it is in fact, a key component to an honest, polite, and civilized society, where people are truly held accountable for their words and their actions by the society itself...
Because the telephone is useless. Nobody actually answers the phone any more. Ever try to conduct business by phone? It is absolutely impossible.
Despite the current trendiness of e-mail and other more "modern" communications methods, there's no question that the phone is used to conduct *far* more real business than all computer-based methods combined.
Phone calls are *the* preferred way of doing business by those actually *doing* business - making contacts, forging relationships, doing deals, signing contracts, etc.
And, oh, by the way, when things get to that contract-signing point, e-mail still isn't used - another "old-style" electronic communications technology, called fax, gets the nod at that point - seems the courts have no problem with faxed signatures, but do not recognize fancy electronic cryptosigs.
(BTW: E-week this week had an interesting article about more and more companies deemphasizing or even abandoning e-mail due to the cost and time lost to dealing with spam and virus epidemics. I think they're on to something - there's a very real backlash brewing against e-mail, IM, and their ilk, and phone and fax are the logical winners in that case.)
In the 128 years since its invention, no one's written a virus that can infect my 1940's-vintage desk phone. It works flawlessly to talk to any other telephone in the world. It even fully supports *all* present and future spoken languages *without* re-flashing the firmware to install a service pack!
You obviously don't like the phone, but in the real world, I'll take a phone over a computer any day - even to run a computer-oriented business like the one I actually do run! (Not to mention that laws against telemarketers are quite effective, while everyone realizes that such laws against spam cannot be enforced and so should not even be tried, as the FCC and FTC recently decided...)
So I'm going to go against your decision that this was the customer's fault for not closely monitoring a format change. I believe that it's partially eFax's fault for not coding their service against a common and catostophic client error.
No, eFax's software did *exactly* what it is supposed to do. It is *designed* to accept text input as well as PDF, but not PostScript. This is not a bug, but a feature - you can very easily send faxes just by generating a regular ASCII text file. The PostScript output is one big, honking, ugly text file, which eFax's software sent exactly as the careless poster asked it to...
I know of several IT shops that will not allow non Cisco equipment into their infrastructure. Would make it hard (if not impossible) to qualify for those accounts.
Cisco is good, but they're by no means in a class all their own from a performance or capability point of view. Personally, I've found Extreme Networks can often offer considerably higher performance at a price that's a bit lower than Cisco's - and the care and feeding of Extreme's gear is *way* easier than Cisco's, too, which is a cost that you should NOT ignore...
I have nothing against Cisco, but Extreme "gets" performance far more than Cisco - for instance, Extreme's gigabit switches have deeper buffers than Cisco's which is irrelevant for most networking tasks, but shows up big-time when you try to do something serious like, say, storage-over-IP, or a cable head-end: it's just way too easy to overrun Cisco's buffers and wind up with your data all over the floor. Of course, if you ever have to retransmit anything because of this, the huge latency involved in that obliterates any chance of good performance. Extreme's engineers know this, and design their gear accordingly.
I'd suggest giving them a chance as an alternative vendor. (I have no relationship with Extreme, either, except as one pleasantly surprised by the company on several occasions.)
Now consider that higher-end motherboards now have more than one PCI bus that can run at this speed, and a PC can make a very good alternative to a router. Again, the key is the software...
Not entirely. Host-based routing is undoubtedly more do-able now than it was a few years ago, since Moore's law is finally delivering hardware that's "fast enough" for most such applications.
The real problems aren't all in the software either. Linux in particular has serious performance problems in such applications. I'm not Linux-bashing here, it's just fact: If you want to do serious host-based network processing, you'll find that only Sun and IBM can really keep up with wire speeds.
There are two reasons for this: First, the superior networking performance of those OSes (which is why *really* big firewalls like the one NASA uses to move *all* of its satellite tlemetry through always run on big IAX boxes); and Second, their markedly superior internal bus architectures. Almost all non-IBM x86 boxes have serious choke points in their buses or buscontrollers. (Seriously, check out the way IBM's x-series servers provide higher I/O cpacities, and you'll realize that if you're planning to really the crank I/O, Dell and HPaq aren't even in this game.
Then, of course, there is the application software, which you correctly point out is often hard to come by (except commercially).
Finally, pay attention to the NICs - they are definitely NOT all created equal. In general, the 3Coms, Intels, and such are trash from a serious performance point of view, and you're generally *way* better off with something designed by a company that haas a clue about protocol and system i/o performance, like Syskonnect.
If you do your homework correctly, you can build a host-based router that will do the job in most cases, but it isn't easy. Especially if you're pushing the limits and don't have the serious multidisciplinary skills required to pull off putting together such a system (I'd estimate fewer than 1 sysadmin in 500 does), you're better off staying with the canned router solutions...
Wow, it sounds like you think its unpatriotic to release code under a license that doesn't restrict uses to the US.
How might things have turned out differently if those foreigners that started the Linux kernel, Mysql, OpenBSD, Python, Ruby, KDE, Mplayer, etc had said the same thing about letting American's profit off of their software.
There's a *huge* difference in individual developers (or loosely coupled groups of them) releasing open source software and a monstrous entity like the US government doing the same.
In the case of software developed on behalf of US taxpayers and at thier expense, though, the Government has a fiduciary (trust) responsibility to safeguard the investment of those taxpayers. (As the late Ronald Reagan famously said, "it's not Washington's money!")
Perhaps that means that some software developed at US taxpayer expense *should* be licensed in such a way that it benefits those that paid for it more than those that did not?
[What]is wrong with making a zipfile and then encrypting it with PGP? The only reasons to put encryption in Winzip itself are fairly bogus arguments about convenience, and the chance to charge more money for a product that does more (even if it does it badly).
Well, let's see - after you've encrypted that Zip file with PGP, you'll be able to exchange it with all of the 0.0001% of the people in the wolrd who have heard of PGP and are willing to put up with the it. (That figure's probably not far off: As evidenced by their actual usage, the vast majority of IT professionals refuse to put up with the pains of PGP/GPG, and they're only a tiny fraction of the world's PC users.
There are decent solutions out there - But even the best tools available, things like AxCrypt, which can be used to encrypt/decrypt any file on the fly are still considerably more of a pain than not using encryption. Encryption is not a panacea, and won't be widely used until it's totally transparently hidden by the OS.
Arguments about convenience are not bogus: they are in fact probably the most valid arguments involved in any sort of security system discussion, since history has proven time and again that users *will* turn off or otherwise render useless any security they find to be obnoxious...
All the comments for them were seething with loathing for John Katz. I remember thinking, "Who is this guy, and why does everyone hate him so much?"
Jon Who? Oh, yeah, that overbearing twerp who not only coudn't write, but felt he had to force his social aganda down everyone's throat in a totally inappropriate forum. I never did figure out why the editors kept the guy (at least at first, later on, they kept him because the outcry generated traffic and page hits.)
In those days, there really wasn't much advantage to being a registered poster, and some of us posted for years as ACs before bothering to register. There were two reasons that finally drove me to register: AC posts began to be treated as second-class, and it was possible to completely filter out things by John Katz, who by that time had proven to me beyond all doubt that I would never care to read anything he wrote...
So do we even really have choice? If not, then why does this plan that God has made us all players in have such a crappy script? What's the point of it all?
/. crowd, which thingks they know everything and that any knowledge more than a year old is irrelevant, but this question has been well and capably thought out and debated already. This issue, in fact, is one of the large issues that split the Protestant church after the Reformation. (BTW - everyone really should read and learn about the Reformation - it's quite certainly the most important and influential event of the past 1000 years.)
I know it will come as quite a shock to the
The issue of "Free Will" has been debated for years, with Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Wesleyans (Methodists) taking markedly different views. Personally, I think the Prebyterian doctrine of predestination makes the most sense (it is certainly the most logically consistent, although it *is* quite uncomfortable in many ways.) This doctrine is largely misunderstood, even by many who call themselves Presbyterians - you really need to read the writings of the Reformers themselves to get a good handle on the issue. If you're looking for a good, relatively easy starting place, try the Westminster Confession of Faith. If you're up for more intellectual challenge, check out Systematic Theology works by Van Til or the various works of Francis Schaeffer.
Christianity is by far the most intellectually challenging and rewarding thing I've ever been involved with. Don't sell it short before learning more - this life is *supposed* to be a search for the Truth. Things become much clearer when you realize that, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever."
It is also worth remembering that much of what did survive out of the destruction of classical learning was eventually preserved and re-transmitted to a deeply ignorant and religiously hidebound Europe several hundred years later through the hands of the relatively liberal and learned muslim arabs...
Your bigotry is showing.
There is no doubt that learning was lost after the fall of Rome. Knowledge was preserved through intervening centuries in several unlikely places far afield. Before you blast the Christians for this, perhaps you should know that much of the ancient knowledge that was saved was in fact preserved by the chirch itself. This included much from Arab and other eastern sources that was lost even in the east when the far-from-civilized Mohammedans deliberately destroyed anything they judged heretical, which by definition is pretty much anything other than the Koran and the Hadith.)
You might want to read How the Irish Saved Civilization to get an understanding of how the church in Irelend was actually instrumental in maintaining a library of this information through the turbulent times of the incorrectly-named "dark ages", and then re-seeding that information throughout Europe. A good book, worth a read...