In other words, Bill Gates gives up on security. "You win. You hackers always seem to find a way to break into our OS, well fine. From now on, we're taking the ball back. NO SECURITY FOR YOU!". Or, perhaps "In the interest of customer service and ease of use, we will now automatically grant administrator access to anyone who can turn the machine on. Down with restrictions!"
In all seriousness, is anyone stupid enough to trust any security initiative put forth by Microsoft after the last few years have been so disastrous for them on that front?
I think some form of RAID is the best backup solution.
Bzzt. And if you delete a file you didn't mean to, or overwrote it with something by accident?
Besides, RAID fails too. What if the controller goes? What if you go on vacation and come back finding TWO of your drives dead on your RAID-5 array? It happened to me. If the most important data weren't backed up OFFLINE, I could have lost everything.
You'll be surprised... 1 million hits/mo assuming a normal distribution is only about 1 hit every 2-3 seconds. Not exactly a big load unless each hit generates a huge complex page that sucks down your bandwidth. Figuring a normal 8-5 day M-F, that goes up to 2 hits/sec.
That's right - I know it's not terribly bad. But during the workday, there's some serious peaks and valleys when it comes to our traffic. The numbers you quote assume an even distribution of hits over the 9-5 (actually we normally see traffic 8-8, given the 9-5 workday in 5 time zones).
I've noted that our peak traffic is usually in the hour starting at 11am EST. It is during this time that we are processing up to 10 transactions/sec, and this is exactly when I've concentrated on monitoring how our servers deal with this traffic. I've been pleased that the servers handle our peak load beautifully.
I've been developing a high traffic site (well, maybe medium traffic) at about 1.5 million transactions per month. We have customers using the site all over North America, plus a few in Europe and Asia, and the whole thing is hosted internally off of our 10MB link.
We have each 'tier' clustered as a pair of servers - 1Ghz/256M is more than sufficient for our 2 Apache servers. 3Ghz/1GB is our Tomcat tier, and I'm not sure what the DB runs on, but they're the beefiest servers of all the tiers.
Within the app architecture, try to ensure that you can scale to more servers. We have the ability to add more servers to any of the above tiers without any changes, plus any long-running processes (complicated reports and such) get dispatched to a fourth layer of servers we call 'backend' (by RMI). These 'backend' servers can be low-end (300mhz/256M are fine), because they run non-time-critical tasks and generally might email their results or whatever.
In this way, we've avoided the EJB complications while also having full redundancy at every level. There was some custom framework involved, but it's been working well. Our application was complex enough to warrant an advanced framework (similar to Struts, except we wrote ours before Struts came out), yet EJB seemed too heavy for what we wanted to accomplish. Of course it didn't hurt that the only thing we paid licenses for was the DB.
Importantly, though, this was the right solution *for us*. It's serving us well, and already scaling well beyond the number of customers we originally anticipated would be using it. While this meets our needs fairly well, it may or may not be the right type of solution for what you're looking for, particularly because I don't know what your application is supposed to do.
Now I'm waiting for someone to visit Radio Shack, buy one of those little motors and hook that up to the scroll. Play with resistors to get it to the right speed.
Bonus points if you can pull juice right from the iPod's battery...
XUL has already made Firefox deathly slow on computers more than 3 years old.
I strongly disagree. I'm using Firefox 1.0 (that I just downloaded this morning) to do my work on my P2/300, running Windows NT 4 (it's my 'Windows test machine' - my Linux box is better)
Overall, I must say I'm very impressed. It's quite snappy even on this crappy machine, which I believe is DOUBLE your estimate - it's about 5 or 6 years old.
Imagine you get a speeding ticket. You follow 'due process' and fight the ticket. Let's say you win (I have done this). You will be made to pay court costs, which are probably as much as the ticket.
Geez you have some backwards laws where you are. I fought a $100 icket I got last January. The ticket was for "interfering with snow removal", yet there was no snow on the ground. Apparently a plow operator complained because he was trying to get by. The neighbourhood I was parked in has no driveways, and the street is the only option for parking (and it's normally legal, as it was supposed to be part of the design). Problem is that the plows the town contracts out are built too big for the streets when there are cars parked, causing the issue, and for some reason these guys were out there 'plowing' the bare ground (I'm not certain why). It took a while, and wasted a lot of my time, but when it was thrown out I didn't have to pay a cent. I argued this on my own - it was the principle, not the money, so I didn't want to shell out for a lawyer.
This was in Ontario, Canada. However, I also had the choice to plead guilty for a reduced fine if I wanted, and wouldn't have to pay court costs. It's only if I pleaded innocent (which I didn't) and lost, then I would have had to pay the ticket plus court costs.
In the end, it actually got thrown out because the town screwed up and forgot to provide their prosecutor with the right documentation, so they couldn't fight me. Made it kind of easy for me, despite me being prepared for a fight.
The University of Toronto used to use it for their first-year undergrads (they now have switched to Java). It was (and, I believe still is) being used in many high schools in Ontario, Canada to teach programming.
I started learning Turing in high school. It was quite a good interpreted language, and while it generally was safe to use, it was also capable of some pretty advanced things too. It was also quite similar to Pascal, which is what made me think of this.
Fact is, if you are DLing content from someone else that is breaking the law (and you just admitted that you know they would be), the law usually considers you guilty as well.
Only if the person was doing so illegally. First of all, you have to assume that the copyright material was illegal to distribute. Second, you have to consider the laws of the person doing the distribution. Theoretically, if the uploader is in a country where copyright laws don't exist, and the downloader is in Canada, I'm not sure where the jurisdiction is for this legal dilemma.
It does not matter if YOU stole that stereo, if you bought it at a swap meet where you knew all the people there were criminals, you are also guilty of a crime.
Please, let's not get into that whole physical vs intellectual property thing. They are different. Don't pretend that by copying a CD, Britney Spears suddenly lost $15-$20. I'm not arguing that it's ok to 'steal' music. I'm just saying that the concepts are different.
Laws or no, you are certinaly also morally bankrupt. You surely know that all those people that created that music surely didn't mean for you to have it all for free.
When you sell something in a country, you abide by their laws. When you produce and distribute music in Canada, you do that with the understanding of what that means according to Canada's copyright laws (at least, until you successfully lobby to get them changed). The law offers some protections for the producer and the consumer. But Canada's protections are different from what you see in the US. So what?
In any case, as I mentioned in another thread, I couldn't care less about this anyway. I have my own personal MP3 collection from CDs I own, or original CDs that I have borrowed (which, again, is legal in Canada). I don't upload my music. I don't download music. Therefore, none of this affects me at the present.
I'm not familiar with Canadian copyright laws, but that sounds pretty messed up.
It's pretty simple, really. I buy a CD. I can lend that CD to a friend, and they are allowed to copy it for personal use. They can then give me my CD back.
What I'm *not* allowed to do is make a copy, and give away the copy.
I think the judge in the case (IIRC) ruled (correctly) that our laws don't cover making copies of material. They only cover distribution of material, as the law stands today.
Right or not, I don't care. I don't download music - I prefer to build my personal MP3 library from CDs I have purchased (or borrowed, as allowed by our law). Since I don't distribute my collection, I don't care much about this whole upload/download interpretation crap.
I have to question the legitamacy of the company altogether. The write-ups are of an amateur nature.
Don't be too surprised. Years ago I worked for a consulting company working on some government projects. Among them, an intranet site with lots of documents. Government documents.
Would you believe that when we found errors (spelling, grammar, etc) in those documents, they paid us developer rates (~$1000/day) to correct them?
Skip to now. I'm working for a different company. We get an RFP for a government project. An official document being sent out to dozens of bidders. Errors all over the place!
I swear... people are getting more and more illiterate. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
No I don't review my/. postings for errors, so it's possible I may have a typo. I don't consider that as important as an official company communiqué.
I'm not sure you understand what I'm suggesting. By implementing it as a driver, it has an opportunity to work with *everything* that uses MIDI, not just the files.
I compose music. That's why I loved the Gravis - it sounded great when I was working on my score. Likewise, games like Doom sounded fantastic too, when the MIDI came out of the UltraSound.
By implementing a driver (Linux AND Windows) that can act as a virtual MIDI device, it would automatically work with *all* of the existing MIDI software out there!
Actually, dipshit, downloading copyrighted material that you don't have a license for *IS* illegal.
Ignoring your hostile tone, it's important to note that legality very much depends on where you live. In Canada, for example, it is quite legal to download music (if you don't share it) for personal use. Of course, the CIRA is trying to change that, but for now the court ruling stands.
I think you can use timidity, which is a software MIDI synthesizer, with a set of instrument samples ('patch files'). Gravis used to put their patch files on their ftp site, I don't know if they're still there.
Thanks. Yeah, I've been using that (I still have my set of patch files).
What I'd *really* love, though, would be if I could find a way to load them onto one of the newer Sound Blasters or something. I'd like to get away from software if possible.
As an aside, that trick, of course, only works on Windows, because that software is only for Windows.
Maybe some kind soul could come up with a Linux kernel driver that can do MIDI Soft Synth using Gravis patchsets, but pump that output to your *actual* sound card? Now THAT would be awesome! Transparency is really what I'm hoping for.
Doom music played through a modern midi synth with sampled sounds is awesome
That reminds me... can anyone recommend a card that actually compares to my old Gravis UltraSound?
That beastie was fantastic! I loved the sampled sounds, and I cried when I could no longer find a decent motherboard with ISA slots so I could plug it in (and there's never been any decent Windows drivers for it).
I haven't found anything that sounds even remotely as good as that old card - I loved it so much I bought two.
For a time, in fact, I had an UltraSound and a Sound Blaster in my PC at the same time - I'd use the UltraSound for all of my MIDI and I'd use the SB for all of the SFX. That was a wonderful combination.
Perhaps your insurance is so low because there's nothing to hit. I've been informed be people who've driven through your province (on their way west from Toronto) that you could fall asleep at the wheel, wake up an hour later, and you're still heading straight down the road if your alignment is good:)
Seriously, though, I'm jealous. In Toronto, the insurance costs are insane. Under 25 and a primary driver of a vehicle? Fork over $4500/year please. Lucky for me I was able to get my dad to claim he was the primary driver on my car, so I could save $3000.
Now that I am 25, and married, I get a bit of a break. And 8 years of driving claim-free doesn't hurt (but it still didn't help before 25).
Good thing this came up. I'm just building a new (replacement for a dying) server now to be used to handle mail for my domain and a couple of non-profit orgs I help with (it'll run their web sites and other things too). I've been running sendmail until now, but am open to suggestions for something better.
Can James integrate with SpamAssassin or something similar? Multiple domains? Forwarding?
It'd be great to find out. I'd much prefer a Java-based solution because I'd be able to put my own skills to good use if I need to extend it somehow.
Generally speaking I just need it to handle SMTP and POP3 and be able to deal with local mailboxes (I'd like have the option to be able to tack on a webmail package).
Maybe someone can also comment on what the best webmail packages are that are freely available?
I never buy from Best Buy anyways... of course, I live in Canada.
Umm, dude? I hate to tell you this, but they're here already. In fact there's a store in Markham, at Markville Mall (scroll down to see them on the floor plan)
There are those of us to whom Tivo is unavailable. For example, I live in Canada and am unable to get a Tivo. I would if I could, but they don't sell up here.
Enter MythTV. Although I haven't built one yet, it's only because I was busy getting married this summer. However, MythTV appears to have a very high spouse approval factor, in that next year I do plan on building one. And the wife is not only ok with it, she's encouraging me to just go for it.
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Was having a tough day. Just wanted to say thank you for bringing a smile to my face with that post. It was beautiful!
In other words, Bill Gates gives up on security. "You win. You hackers always seem to find a way to break into our OS, well fine. From now on, we're taking the ball back. NO SECURITY FOR YOU!". Or, perhaps "In the interest of customer service and ease of use, we will now automatically grant administrator access to anyone who can turn the machine on. Down with restrictions!"
In all seriousness, is anyone stupid enough to trust any security initiative put forth by Microsoft after the last few years have been so disastrous for them on that front?
I think some form of RAID is the best backup solution.
Bzzt. And if you delete a file you didn't mean to, or overwrote it with something by accident?
Besides, RAID fails too. What if the controller goes? What if you go on vacation and come back finding TWO of your drives dead on your RAID-5 array? It happened to me. If the most important data weren't backed up OFFLINE, I could have lost everything.
You'll be surprised... 1 million hits/mo assuming a normal distribution is only about 1 hit every 2-3 seconds. Not exactly a big load unless each hit generates a huge complex page that sucks down your bandwidth. Figuring a normal 8-5 day M-F, that goes up to 2 hits/sec.
That's right - I know it's not terribly bad. But during the workday, there's some serious peaks and valleys when it comes to our traffic. The numbers you quote assume an even distribution of hits over the 9-5 (actually we normally see traffic 8-8, given the 9-5 workday in 5 time zones).
I've noted that our peak traffic is usually in the hour starting at 11am EST. It is during this time that we are processing up to 10 transactions/sec, and this is exactly when I've concentrated on monitoring how our servers deal with this traffic. I've been pleased that the servers handle our peak load beautifully.
What constitutes 'high traffic' for you?
I've been developing a high traffic site (well, maybe medium traffic) at about 1.5 million transactions per month. We have customers using the site all over North America, plus a few in Europe and Asia, and the whole thing is hosted internally off of our 10MB link.
We have each 'tier' clustered as a pair of servers - 1Ghz/256M is more than sufficient for our 2 Apache servers. 3Ghz/1GB is our Tomcat tier, and I'm not sure what the DB runs on, but they're the beefiest servers of all the tiers.
Within the app architecture, try to ensure that you can scale to more servers. We have the ability to add more servers to any of the above tiers without any changes, plus any long-running processes (complicated reports and such) get dispatched to a fourth layer of servers we call 'backend' (by RMI). These 'backend' servers can be low-end (300mhz/256M are fine), because they run non-time-critical tasks and generally might email their results or whatever.
In this way, we've avoided the EJB complications while also having full redundancy at every level. There was some custom framework involved, but it's been working well. Our application was complex enough to warrant an advanced framework (similar to Struts, except we wrote ours before Struts came out), yet EJB seemed too heavy for what we wanted to accomplish. Of course it didn't hurt that the only thing we paid licenses for was the DB.
Importantly, though, this was the right solution *for us*. It's serving us well, and already scaling well beyond the number of customers we originally anticipated would be using it. While this meets our needs fairly well, it may or may not be the right type of solution for what you're looking for, particularly because I don't know what your application is supposed to do.
Now I'm waiting for someone to visit Radio Shack, buy one of those little motors and hook that up to the scroll. Play with resistors to get it to the right speed.
Bonus points if you can pull juice right from the iPod's battery...
XUL has already made Firefox deathly slow on computers more than 3 years old.
I strongly disagree. I'm using Firefox 1.0 (that I just downloaded this morning) to do my work on my P2/300, running Windows NT 4 (it's my 'Windows test machine' - my Linux box is better)
Overall, I must say I'm very impressed. It's quite snappy even on this crappy machine, which I believe is DOUBLE your estimate - it's about 5 or 6 years old.
Imagine you get a speeding ticket. You follow 'due process' and fight the ticket. Let's say you win (I have done this). You will be made to pay court costs, which are probably as much as the ticket.
Geez you have some backwards laws where you are. I fought a $100 icket I got last January. The ticket was for "interfering with snow removal", yet there was no snow on the ground. Apparently a plow operator complained because he was trying to get by. The neighbourhood I was parked in has no driveways, and the street is the only option for parking (and it's normally legal, as it was supposed to be part of the design). Problem is that the plows the town contracts out are built too big for the streets when there are cars parked, causing the issue, and for some reason these guys were out there 'plowing' the bare ground (I'm not certain why). It took a while, and wasted a lot of my time, but when it was thrown out I didn't have to pay a cent. I argued this on my own - it was the principle, not the money, so I didn't want to shell out for a lawyer.
This was in Ontario, Canada. However, I also had the choice to plead guilty for a reduced fine if I wanted, and wouldn't have to pay court costs. It's only if I pleaded innocent (which I didn't) and lost, then I would have had to pay the ticket plus court costs.
In the end, it actually got thrown out because the town screwed up and forgot to provide their prosecutor with the right documentation, so they couldn't fight me. Made it kind of easy for me, despite me being prepared for a fight.
Works in Toronto too...
You mean something like this?
The University of Toronto used to use it for their first-year undergrads (they now have switched to Java). It was (and, I believe still is) being used in many high schools in Ontario, Canada to teach programming.
I started learning Turing in high school. It was quite a good interpreted language, and while it generally was safe to use, it was also capable of some pretty advanced things too. It was also quite similar to Pascal, which is what made me think of this.
Id releases Doom 3 for Linux, Cray announces availability of new supercomputer.
Dare we say, we've finally actually found the hardware that can run this game?
Fact is, if you are DLing content from someone else that is breaking the law (and you just admitted that you know they would be), the law usually considers you guilty as well.
Only if the person was doing so illegally. First of all, you have to assume that the copyright material was illegal to distribute. Second, you have to consider the laws of the person doing the distribution. Theoretically, if the uploader is in a country where copyright laws don't exist, and the downloader is in Canada, I'm not sure where the jurisdiction is for this legal dilemma.
It does not matter if YOU stole that stereo, if you bought it at a swap meet where you knew all the people there were criminals, you are also guilty of a crime.
Please, let's not get into that whole physical vs intellectual property thing. They are different. Don't pretend that by copying a CD, Britney Spears suddenly lost $15-$20. I'm not arguing that it's ok to 'steal' music. I'm just saying that the concepts are different.
Laws or no, you are certinaly also morally bankrupt. You surely know that all those people that created that music surely didn't mean for you to have it all for free.
When you sell something in a country, you abide by their laws. When you produce and distribute music in Canada, you do that with the understanding of what that means according to Canada's copyright laws (at least, until you successfully lobby to get them changed). The law offers some protections for the producer and the consumer. But Canada's protections are different from what you see in the US. So what?
In any case, as I mentioned in another thread, I couldn't care less about this anyway. I have my own personal MP3 collection from CDs I own, or original CDs that I have borrowed (which, again, is legal in Canada). I don't upload my music. I don't download music. Therefore, none of this affects me at the present.
I'm not familiar with Canadian copyright laws, but that sounds pretty messed up.
It's pretty simple, really. I buy a CD. I can lend that CD to a friend, and they are allowed to copy it for personal use. They can then give me my CD back.
What I'm *not* allowed to do is make a copy, and give away the copy.
I think the judge in the case (IIRC) ruled (correctly) that our laws don't cover making copies of material. They only cover distribution of material, as the law stands today.
Right or not, I don't care. I don't download music - I prefer to build my personal MP3 library from CDs I have purchased (or borrowed, as allowed by our law). Since I don't distribute my collection, I don't care much about this whole upload/download interpretation crap.
The shame. Wasting all that precious fuel on some nuclear reactors. I mean, how many DeLoreans can we power with 140kg of plutonium?
I have to question the legitamacy of the company altogether. The write-ups are of an amateur nature.
/. postings for errors, so it's possible I may have a typo. I don't consider that as important as an official company communiqué.
Don't be too surprised. Years ago I worked for a consulting company working on some government projects. Among them, an intranet site with lots of documents. Government documents.
Would you believe that when we found errors (spelling, grammar, etc) in those documents, they paid us developer rates (~$1000/day) to correct them?
Skip to now. I'm working for a different company. We get an RFP for a government project. An official document being sent out to dozens of bidders. Errors all over the place!
I swear... people are getting more and more illiterate. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
No I don't review my
Learn grammer
Perhaps he'll learn grammar when you've learned spelling
I'm not sure you understand what I'm suggesting. By implementing it as a driver, it has an opportunity to work with *everything* that uses MIDI, not just the files.
I compose music. That's why I loved the Gravis - it sounded great when I was working on my score. Likewise, games like Doom sounded fantastic too, when the MIDI came out of the UltraSound.
By implementing a driver (Linux AND Windows) that can act as a virtual MIDI device, it would automatically work with *all* of the existing MIDI software out there!
Actually, dipshit, downloading copyrighted material that you don't have a license for *IS* illegal.
Ignoring your hostile tone, it's important to note that legality very much depends on where you live. In Canada, for example, it is quite legal to download music (if you don't share it) for personal use. Of course, the CIRA is trying to change that, but for now the court ruling stands.
I think you can use timidity, which is a software MIDI synthesizer, with a set of instrument samples ('patch files'). Gravis used to put their patch files on their ftp site, I don't know if they're still there.
Thanks. Yeah, I've been using that (I still have my set of patch files).
What I'd *really* love, though, would be if I could find a way to load them onto one of the newer Sound Blasters or something. I'd like to get away from software if possible.
As an aside, that trick, of course, only works on Windows, because that software is only for Windows.
Maybe some kind soul could come up with a Linux kernel driver that can do MIDI Soft Synth using Gravis patchsets, but pump that output to your *actual* sound card? Now THAT would be awesome! Transparency is really what I'm hoping for.
Doom music played through a modern midi synth with sampled sounds is awesome
That reminds me... can anyone recommend a card that actually compares to my old Gravis UltraSound?
That beastie was fantastic! I loved the sampled sounds, and I cried when I could no longer find a decent motherboard with ISA slots so I could plug it in (and there's never been any decent Windows drivers for it).
I haven't found anything that sounds even remotely as good as that old card - I loved it so much I bought two.
For a time, in fact, I had an UltraSound and a Sound Blaster in my PC at the same time - I'd use the UltraSound for all of my MIDI and I'd use the SB for all of the SFX. That was a wonderful combination.
I live in Canada, Saskatchewan to be specific
:)
Perhaps your insurance is so low because there's nothing to hit. I've been informed be people who've driven through your province (on their way west from Toronto) that you could fall asleep at the wheel, wake up an hour later, and you're still heading straight down the road if your alignment is good
Seriously, though, I'm jealous. In Toronto, the insurance costs are insane. Under 25 and a primary driver of a vehicle? Fork over $4500/year please. Lucky for me I was able to get my dad to claim he was the primary driver on my car, so I could save $3000.
Now that I am 25, and married, I get a bit of a break. And 8 years of driving claim-free doesn't hurt (but it still didn't help before 25).
Good thing this came up. I'm just building a new (replacement for a dying) server now to be used to handle mail for my domain and a couple of non-profit orgs I help with (it'll run their web sites and other things too). I've been running sendmail until now, but am open to suggestions for something better.
Can James integrate with SpamAssassin or something similar? Multiple domains? Forwarding?
It'd be great to find out. I'd much prefer a Java-based solution because I'd be able to put my own skills to good use if I need to extend it somehow.
Generally speaking I just need it to handle SMTP and POP3 and be able to deal with local mailboxes (I'd like have the option to be able to tack on a webmail package).
Maybe someone can also comment on what the best webmail packages are that are freely available?
but I don't think I would discuss their situation in church...
I think the guy probably spends a lot of time in the confession booth. Probably right after talking to you:
Forgive me, father, for I have lied.
I never buy from Best Buy anyways... of course, I live in Canada.
Umm, dude? I hate to tell you this, but they're here already. In fact there's a store in Markham, at Markville Mall (scroll down to see them on the floor plan)
There are those of us to whom Tivo is unavailable. For example, I live in Canada and am unable to get a Tivo. I would if I could, but they don't sell up here.
Enter MythTV. Although I haven't built one yet, it's only because I was busy getting married this summer. However, MythTV appears to have a very high spouse approval factor, in that next year I do plan on building one. And the wife is not only ok with it, she's encouraging me to just go for it.