In the article, they point out that RAID will only help if a drive fails on its own, and not if there's a MB failure or some other badness.
And one of the points was they were going for a cheap offering. Adding more stuff means adding more $$$$.
Okay, first off, what planet are you living on where solid state electronics are less reliable than hard drives with moving parts? Also, RAID is cheap, relative to the total cost of the system. These clowns spent almost $3200 building a storage system, but were too cheap to spend an extra $350 to support RAID 5? Yeah, that's freaking smart.
They're relying on the MTBF of the drives, but they forgot that your chances of failure go up with every additional drive you add to your storage setup. With four drives, you've quadrupled the chances that one of those drives is going to fail early. I don't remember enough about MTBF calculations and don't know enough about statistics to know what that does to your real-world MTBF numbers, but I'd bet that your real-world MTBF can be no better than one-quarter what it is for a single drive.
The people who wrote that article are serious morons. They completely misspent their money, if their goal was to build a storage server. For a storage server, what's most important is reliability and IO throughput. If you're on a budget, there's no sense in spending $500 on a CPU and motherboard and another $350 on 1GB of RAM. An Athlon and MB combo with 256MB or so of RAM could be had for probably the cost of their CPU alone. They could have then spent the rest of their budget wisely, by buying a high-performance RAID controller.
The problem is their idiotic dual-purpose requirement. Storage servers aren't workstations and vice versa. High CPU performance isn't a requirement for speedy file-serving: High performance hard drives and a high-performance caching RAID controller do that. Putting a gigabit Ethernet card in the server and hooking it to a switch with a decent bandwidth will do more to speed up your file fetches than putting a 3 GHz P4 on the MB.
The guy you knew in middle school who hated Macs for no apparent reason.
Middle school? Hell, when I was in middle school, the Mac wasn't even a twinkle in Jef Raskin's eye yet. Steve and Steve were still living high on the Apple ][ hog. The ill-fated Apple III and Lisa hadn't even embarrassed the company yet. The Mac finally shipped during my junior year of high school, and the only reason to hate it then was it cost so damn much.
Come to think of it, annoying Apple zealotry aside, price is still the only reason I haven't bought a Mac.
I agree that if I'd bought one of those things and it started redirecting my traffic, I'd consider it defective and demand my money back. Belkin's really moronic to think that this won't backfire on them and result in an expensive class-action lawsuit. Maybe they can defuse a lawsuit by offering refunds to anyone who's upset at the feature, but I'm guessing they're too sold on their own flawed logic to understand that what they did is not going to be seen as anything other than making the product do something its owners didn't ask it to do, and that Belkin didn't tell them it would do.
I can smell the class-action attorneys lining up now.
FYI, the extended version of LotR:FotR was much more satisfying than the theatrical release. The characters were better developed, the story flowed better and the viewer got more involved. That's saying a lot, because the original theatrical release of FoTR was damn good.
For LotR:TTT, a lot of stuff got left out of the theatrical release simply because of economics: Movie theaters don't like movies longer than three hours because they can't turn over the audiences fast enough to make money. Movie studios despise movies longer than three hours for the same reason. Peter Jackson was able to make a great movie out of the material he'd shot for TTT and release it to theaters at an acceptable length. Now, he's putting back in the material he really wanted to put in the movie in the first place and releasing it to DVD for the people who want to see the whole movie.
Oh, and for those who think that adding material to a movie only makes it longer, please keep in mind the example of Apocalypse Now Redux, which contains 45 minutes of new footage, but actually feels shorter than the original movie. It's hard to explain, but in the original theatrical release of Apocalypse Now most of the last half of the movie proceeds at a slow, throbbing tempo, which seems to take forever. The new footage actually breaks up what was the second half of the movie into a lot of interesting segments. When the movie's over, it doesn't seem to have taken as long because it didn't lull you to sleep with so much unbroken slowness.
No, I was most definitely not defending MS's poor security performance. I merely pointed out that even as shoddy as MS's security efforts have been to date, even they haven't attempted to get away with something as stupid as telling their customers "Pay $129 to get the latest security fixes."
A) shipped Panther and B) were informed of the bug after A)
Please tell me how Apple fixed security problems before they were informed of them? Public disclosure does not equal initial notification. Security researchers routinely privately notify software companies of their discoveries of flaws and then allow those companies time to fix the flaws before they publicly disclose them. In return, the software companies state in their press releases, something to the effect of, "XYZ software thanks Foo Bar of Baz Security Research for discovering this flaw."
As for Microsoft, they sure as hell fixed bugs in NT 4 after Win2k shipped, as well as after XP shipped - and NT4 is EOL, so they won't fix any more bugs that are found, and there will be more bugs found in NT4.
Clearly, you're speaking as someone who doesn't bother actually reading security notices or reading discussions on security-related mailing lists. Of course MS discovered and fixed security bugs in NT 4.0 after Win2k and XP shipped. My point was that MS frequently releases patches to existing products based on fixes to the code base that were discovered while developing new products. Microsoft has the same arrangement with security researchers that Apple does: Let us know privately about any flaws and when we finish the patch, we'll publicly give you credit for finding the flaw. This is done to give MS or Apple time to develop, test and release a patch before exploit code gets out "in the wild."
And yes, MS has EOL'd NT 4.0, but that product is seven years old, as opposed to Jaguar, which is about a year old. You can't compare MS's decision to stop patching NT with Apple's initial reluctance to patch Jaguar. I have never heard of MS deciding to hold off on releasing a fix until a new OS version ships and then not getting around to simultaneously releasing the fix for the formerly-current-now-previous version. Even if Apple did plan to patch Jaguar all along and this is a colossal misunderstanding, their inability to coordinate updates for Jaguar and Panther simultaneously doesn't speak well of their security efforts.
I'm guessing the director of research at a leading security company is not going to bother with clueless tech support droids. I'd suspect he has a direct line to the people responsible for security issues with the various OS products. It's highly probable the person he spoke to was reasonably well-informed. Does that mean that the person he spoke to was definitely in the loop? Possibly not. However, I'd suspect if that person didn't know, they might just say, "I don't know what the plans are at this point," as opposed to saying they weren't planning to port those security updates back to Jaguar.
And keep in mind, here, that the quote wasn't, "They didn't know of any plans," it was "they weren't going to." It's possible that Goldsmith misunderstood what he was told or exaggerated what he was told, but security researchers depend on their reputations, so I think they tend to be careful about overstating such things. Again, keep in mind that Goldsmith said, "I wouldn't be surprised if they change that," which shows that he wasn't trying to make more of it than there was.
However, none of this changes the fact that Apple initially planned not to backport the fixes to Jaguar. Apple zealots can stop trying to rewrite history after the fact.
According to David Goldsmith of @Stake, "In my initial conversations with them [Apple], they said they weren't going to fix 10.2, but I wouldn't be surprised if they change that."
In other words, this isn't just some sort of overblown speculation run amok. Apple did initially tell security experts they didn't plan to patch Jaguar. That was a stupid plan, and even the security experts didn't expect that to last, but that doesn't change the fact that someone from Apple did claim Jaguar wouldn't be patched.
What I find amusing is the fact that Apple zealots are using this story and its development as further evidence in the conspiracy against Apple, when even the much-hated (and deservedly so) Microsoft has been known to back-port security and even many stability patches to the current and previous versions of their OSes as they're working on their next generation products. Does anybody remember that MS backported lots of fixes to NT 4.0 in SP5 and SP6 based on work they'd done developing Win2k?
Unlike Apple, however, MS didn't make NT 4.0 users wait until after Win2k shipped before bothering to release the fixes for NT 4.0. Jaguar users shouldn't have had to wait until after Panther shipped to get those security fixes. They're still waiting, aren't they?
This is what happened at Three Mile Island (TMI)- they lost the water. They melted parts of their core, but that was the extent of the meltdown. The reactor vessel did it's job and physically contained the uranium. The containment building did it's job, along with all the auxillary systems, and no appreciable radiation was released to the public. TMI proved that we can handle a disaster without endangering the public.
The History Channel just ran a show about both TMI and Chernobyl. They didn't go into quite as much technical detail about Chernobyl as you did, but they went into a lot more detail about TMI than you did. The core was only partially melted because, eventually, the designers of the reactor (Babcock & Wilcox) were able to get through to the control room at TMI in time and tell the plant managers to turn the water pumps back on.
Had B&W not been able to get through to the control room at TMI, the core would have eventually melted down completely, leading to a "China Syndrome" where the molten core would have hit the water table and sent radioactive steam shooting up from the ground in the nearby area.
Another danger at TMI was the buildup of hydrogen gas in the containment building. Left alone, this buildup could have eventually led to an explosion that would have blown the top off the containment building.
None of these bad things happened, but that does not mean that TMI's design was inherently safe. There were a number of flaws in the design at TMI. Many of them had to do with how the plant was instrumented. A pressure relieve valve's status only indicated that a command to close the valve had been sent. It did not actually indicate whether the valve had closed (it had not). The core coolant levels were measured indirectly, by making deductions based on steam temperature and pressure, leading to incorrect readings when water was not present in the system.
In short, nothing is more dangerous than to make unwarranted assumptions about something being safe. Everything is dangerous to some extent. Failure to appreciate risks is the fastest way to disaster.
DirecTV TiVos won't do anything in the way of recording unless you pay for the $4.99 a month TiVo fee. But then, if you're not going to use a DirecTV TiVo as a TiVo, then what's the point of buying one in the first place?
BTW: That $4.99 a month covers all the TiVos you connect to your dish (up to 8). Each additional TiVo only gets charged the usual $5 a month "mirroring" fee that you'd pay for any DirecTV receiver.
Rumor has it that DirecTV will finally roll out the 4.0 software and the Home Media Option sometime before the end of the year or in the first quarter of next year.
Keep in mind that nothing's official here, and all bets could be off the minute Rupert Murdoch gets his grubby fingers on DirecTV.
I also went out and snagged one at lunch. The receipt does say something about being a "new DirecTV customer," but the salesdroid swore up and down there's no new-customer-only requirement. He did say that if I didn't activate it within 30 days, they'll hit my credit card for another $150, so I'm guessing the 12 month activation hit is the big deal here.
BTW: For anyone curious about DirecTV's 12 month commitments, they are not cumulative. This means you can buy a DirecTV and get it installed free, buy a TiVo receiver a couple of weeks later, and move a month after that (and take advantage of the DirecTV move offer), and only the most recent 12 month commitment applies.
Okay, because you asked for it, here are the major differences between Series 1 and Series 2 standalone devices:
Series 1
PowerPC CPU (~43MHz), 16MB RAM
Analog modem, serial port, IR blaster port
Latest software revision: 3.0.xx
No USB ports
Disk space easily expandable to 240GB with TiVo-compiled kernel. Some users have compiled custom kernels to enable support of HDs larger than 127GB
No anti-hack code built into BIOS or kernel
To encourage people to upgrade to Series 2 TiVos, TiVo has apparently ceased development of software for Series 1 devices. It looks like 3.0.xx is the last version Series 1 owners will ever see.
Series 2
MIPS CPU (~200MHz), 32MB RAM
Analog modem, serial port, IR blaster port
Latest software revision: 4.0.xx
2 USB 1.1 ports included (some TiVos have USB 2.0-compatible hardware, but the kernel has not enabled USB 2.0 compatibility)
Disk space easily expandable to 240GB with TiVo-compiled kernel
BIOS has anti-hack code. Will only load kernel signed by TiVo. TiVo-signed kernel will only load code signed by TiVo, effectively eliminating hacks without replacing BIOS.
TiVo officially supports USB-ethernet dongles for features such as daily call and Home Media Option. Someday, TiVo may offer home network-based multi-TiVo conflict resolution, allowing you to use all tuners on all TiVos as if they belonged to a single monster TiVo.
There are people who've successfully hacked the Series 2 TiVos by replacing the BIOS with one that has the signature-check edited out, but that requires soldering, which is more than most TiVophiles are comfortable with.
In contrast, people with Series 1 devices have added ethernet cards, installed more RAM, installed Apache and a full web-based UI for programming TiVo, etc.
I own a couple of Series 1 standalone TiVos, but don't own any Series 2 standalones. I do own an HDVR2, which is the second generation DirecTV-integrated model. I haven't done anything to it yet.
Ask any cook worth his/her pinch of salt and they'll tell you that non-stick pans are not good for a lot of things. Specifically, any time you want to cook a meat to a nice brown color and then make a sauce, you specifically don't want a non-stick pan. You actually want little bits of the meat to stick to your pan as you cook.
Why, you ask? Because, those little bits that stick to the pan undergo something called the Maillard reaction (similar to sugars caramelizing) which results in deliciously complex flavors you can't get otherwise. Plus, when you're done cooking the meat, you can deglaze those little stuck bits with some water, alcohol, vegetable or fruit juice and the deglazed bits will form the basis of your sauce.
That's one of the reasons why chefs will pay $200 and up for a clad saute pan that appears to be stainless steel (definitely not non-stick).
I don't think Forbes has a reputation for particularly honest or fair reporting.
If that's true, then the feedback I just sent them will be water off a duck's back. Heavy sigh.
Lyons disguises commentary as reporting
After reading Daniel Lyons' "Linux's Hit Men," my first reaction was to disbelieve that he could be so wrong about so many things. The more I thought about the article and the more I re-read it, the more I realized the article is a thinly-veiled commentary disguised as a news article. Lyons used inflammatory language to taint the story and make it clear how the reader should feel about the subject. I thought journalists were supposed to find and explain the truth, and in so doing, not color the reader's understanding with unnecessarily emotional language.
Nowhere is Mr. Lyons' bias against Linux and the GPL more obvious than his "burn down your house" metaphor. This is clearly a ridiculous assertion. Mr. Lyons completely ignores the benefits gained by Cisco and Broadcom in using GPL'd source code in their products: Those companies were able to develop products more quickly and at lower cost than they could have done otherwise. In so doing, they gained a crucial edge in time-to-market and a crucial per-unit cost advantage. If Cisco's Linksys division has sold 400,000 broadband routers at a retail price of $129, then it stands to reason that Cisco is selling those devices to retailers for between $65 and $100 apiece, which even Mr. Lyons has to admit means between $26 and $40 million in sales. Imagine if Cisco and Broadcom had infringed Microsoft's or SCO's copyrights to bring their products to market. Instead of negotiating quietly with Eben Moglen to either release the disputed code to the public or remove modified GPL code from their products, they'd be negotiating just how much of their profits would be due to Microsoft or SCO--and rightly so.
I have used Linux, but am hardly a Linux zealot or proponent. Where I work I am responsible for all servers and communications infrastructure, and I have no Linux servers installed throughout the organization, nor have I lobbied for my company to introduce Linux. Yet even so, I understand the tenets of the GPL and respect them, and I can foresee business cases where the benefits of using GPL'd source code would outweigh the costs of releasing derivative code back to the GPL community.
Perhaps Mr. Lyons' preconceptions limit his ability to fairly evaluate any disputes involving the GPL, but passing his biases off as journalism reflects poorly on Mr. Lyons and his editors.
I've been testing Mozilla since the 0.6 release, I think, and I switched to it as my primary browser just before it went to 1.0. The straw that finally broke the camel's back was that IE couldn't properly render sites that were being Borg'd into MSN (i.e., ESPN). Mozilla had no such problems.
Tabbed browsing and popup-blocking were merely the icing on the cake, but now that I use Mozilla as my primary browser, I cringe when I'm forced to use IE for anything.
It isn't *just* that he sent thousands of spams. He allegedly hacked into others' PCs and sent the spams from them. Doing so with a bogus return address would have been bad enough, but he allegedly forged return addresses to redirect bounces to Philadelphia sportswriters. Unlike most spammers, this guy had an axe to grind, which made him far more traceable. Also, unlike most spammers, he attacked a very targeted group of people.
The clown involved in this mess is well known on the rec.sport.baseball newsgroup (and presumably in the Phillies newsgroup, as well). Nobody there is shedding a tear over his apprehension. He's a crank and a racist and nobody will miss his lunatic rants.
That said, if he were just a crank and a racist and hadn't done anything specifically illegal, this would be a good time to complain about the preferential treatment received by some in our society. But this particular case is about a guy who broke the law and did so in a way that pointed the finger right back at him. I have a hard time feeling outraged on his behalf.
NASA has an escalation process, if these engineers *really* felt there was a problem, all they had to do was push that button.
Did you, or did you not actually read the article?
The reason I ask is because it's clear from the article that the engineers did attempt to escalate things and their efforts were squashed. And let's be clear about something: NASA has a very limited supply of shuttle orbiters and an even more limited supply of public support (and Congressional funding) if they lose any more of those orbiters (and the people in them).
It is therefore of paramount importance that NASA engineers consider the possible catastrophic consequences of all sorts of failures, and it's vitally important that NASA managers realize the consequences that can result from their actions and pay the proper amount of attention to concerns raised by engineers that state a possibility of catastrophic loss.
NASA had clearly forgotten the lessons of Challenger because they discovered the day before Columbia was to launch that an important component already mounted on Columbia had failed to meet minimum standards. Instead of replacing the component, NASA managers opted to grant a temporary waiver allowing the component to fly. This is exactly the sort of behavior we should never again see at NASA.
Yes, space travel and exploration are dangerous, but the American public won't stand for repeated losses of complex, expensive spacecraft, even if they're willing to sacrifice the crews (which they're not, by and large). This isn't combat. Unforeseeable losses--caused by such things as sudden solar flares, meteoroids or orbital debris from the recent failure of a spacecraft or launch vehicle from another country--could be excused. Foreseeable losses cannot.
Laura DiDio knows Sontag and McBride, not Stowell and McBride, and she's known them for 15 years since they all worked for Novell.
While her prior relationships with Sontag and McBride don't exactly encourage her to view them suspiciously, her reputation as an analyst is at stake if she doesn't hold Sontag and McBride to the same standards (higher, perhaps) as others whom she reports on and offers opinions about.
In other words, just because she knows them from having worked at Novell, doesn't mean she's in bed with them to scare the world into paying SCO huge sums of money. Far more likely is that she believed what she was told because SCO told her a compelling story. That story may only be half true (i.e., the code's the same, but SCO didn't own the code, anyway), but she has no way of knowing that.
Sadly, in a democracy, "right" or "wrong" is irrelevant. It's what the majority wants that counts.
Now, strictly speaking, the US isn't a democracy. Ancient Athens was a democracy, and the voters decided everything of importance directly, much the way Californians vote at nearly every election to decide things their legislature probably could have handled for them.
The US is a democratic republic where the voters are represented by legislators who vote on their behalf. Those legislators are only beholden to honor the wishes of their constituents as long as they care about getting re-elected.
Unfortunately, in the US, those legislators are usually more concerned with getting re-elected than they are with doing what's right or even what their constituents want. So we get government-by-special-interest, where legislators push the agendas of their biggest contributors.
So, back to the original point: In any popular vote, whether the majority is right or wrong is irrelevant. They get what they want. Only people of conscience voting against what they think is wrong--regardless of the consequences--can hope to derail a wrong-headed majority.
Also, in the US, there's this little thing called the Constitution. It's very difficult to change the Constitution and the Constitution can be damnably inconvenient when the majority wants a law passed that discriminates against a specific minority. But, as we've seen in the past, even the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution can be swayed by conventional wisdom of the day. Dredd Scott, anyone?
Translation: We implemented something that may have broken large parts of the Internet, but we'll wait until everyone has given up on us fixing it before we decide whether to undo what we did.
By the time they decide if they really broke everything they broke, and whether they should temporarily suspend SiteFinder, everybody else will have routed around them.
BTW: Does anybody know what they're talking about when they claim that other TLDs have implemented something like SiteFinder?
Wouldn't this require more complex in-orbit acrobatics to join the cargo and crew craft?
This kind of orbital rendezvous and docking is incredibly old hat and is so relatively simple that it's literally automated. Russian Progress cargo ships automatically found and docked with the Mir space station. The near misses and collisions that finally crippled Mir were caused by tests of using humans to remotely pilot the Progress modules to Mir. Progress cargo ships also are used to resupply the ISS while the shuttle is grounded.
And don't forget that orbital rendezvous has been around since the days of Gemini and orbital docking was required for the Apollo program (the LM's ascent stage had to dock with the CSM so the crew could return to Earth).
This is by no means a more advanced form of rocket science than is already happening on every ISS mission
The tiles all have to be reglued, things have to be towed out of the ocean, etc...
While your sentiment is correct (the orbiter is barely reusable), your details aren't. The orbiter loses tiles (I don't know exact numbers, but they're in the low hundreds at the very highest and most likely less than a hundred) every mission, but a small percentage compared to the thousands that are attached to the shuttle.
What really makes a mockery of the "reusable" tag is the fact that the shuttle's main engines are pulled and refurbed after every flight. Each shuttle mission involves a different cluster of engines than the one before it--even on the same orbiter.
Even so, it's not the barely reusable nature of the shuttle that makes it so hideously expensive to operate: It's the fact that the shuttle was designed to serve too many masters in the first place. NASA couldn't find the budget to build the shuttle by itself, so it co-opted the Air Force into providing funding for the shuttle's development. But doing so ensured that the shuttle orbiter would be huge, in order to drag gigantic KH-11 spy satellites into orbit. This drove up the cost of development, drove up the launch costs and made the beast even more complex than it could have been.
The current concepts for an "orbital space plane" that'll just haul people to and from orbit is a great idea. It should be dramatically cheaper to launch and operate safely. Heavy lifters for orbital cargo are also a good idea. Separating the people from payload makes sense. The payload doesn't have to be sent up on a human-rated booster system, and the people-carrier can be as small as it needs to be.
Hey, I used to work for a company where we had about 200 PC users and 30 Mac users. The Mac users were self-supporting (they had to be--the IT dept had no Mac support resources), yet I still found myself helping out down in the Mac area on occasion. For PC support, we had: Me. We had a help-desk, but most of the help desk was dedicated to supporting our in-house order-entry and order-fulfillment applications. We had a phone admin/sysadmin responsible for Novell, I helped out some on Novell and Unix, and we had Unix admin work being done by our programmers.
Yet, in spite of the fact that the ratio was one guy for 200 PCs to nobody for 30 Macs, the real support burden was on about 4 or 5 Mac users, and they were, to put it mildly, getting really pissed off at their Macs. Their Macs crashed a lot. This was in the days of Mac OS 7.x when Apple claimed that Copland would fix everything.
On the PC side, we were running some OS/2, some MS-DOS/WfWg 3.11, some DR-DOS and some Novell DOS. The Windows users suffered from typical Windows lousiness, but when NT 4.0 came into the company, the Mac users seriously considered switching to NT.
It never happened, for whatever reason, but that's how fed up the Mac users were at the time. Keep in mind that before Mac OS X brought NeXTStep/BSD goodness to the Mac world, Apple's Copland initiative would have only brought Macs to the level of Windows 95 (in terms of memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking).
Now that Macs have OS X, I'm willing to consider them, but good luck getting any of the apps I need to run on them.
Perhaps you should have gone back and read the original article, instead of simply commenting on a quote taken out of context. The original article stated that the Deutsche Bank analyst was told the code he saw was specifically not from IBM, but from another Unix hardware vendor, and that they were pretty clear they didn't mean IBM or Sun.
There aren't a lot of other Unix hardware vendors these days, although a few years ago, there were plenty. Ironically, though the NUMA and other code didn't originally come from IBM--it came from Sequent, which is now owned by IBM. Hence, SCO could be lying by omission. If the code came from Sequent, IBM still owns it.
Slashdot Mirror
In the article, they point out that RAID will only help if a drive fails on its own, and not if there's a MB failure or some other badness. And one of the points was they were going for a cheap offering. Adding more stuff means adding more $$$$.
Okay, first off, what planet are you living on where solid state electronics are less reliable than hard drives with moving parts? Also, RAID is cheap, relative to the total cost of the system. These clowns spent almost $3200 building a storage system, but were too cheap to spend an extra $350 to support RAID 5? Yeah, that's freaking smart.
They're relying on the MTBF of the drives, but they forgot that your chances of failure go up with every additional drive you add to your storage setup. With four drives, you've quadrupled the chances that one of those drives is going to fail early. I don't remember enough about MTBF calculations and don't know enough about statistics to know what that does to your real-world MTBF numbers, but I'd bet that your real-world MTBF can be no better than one-quarter what it is for a single drive.
The people who wrote that article are serious morons. They completely misspent their money, if their goal was to build a storage server. For a storage server, what's most important is reliability and IO throughput. If you're on a budget, there's no sense in spending $500 on a CPU and motherboard and another $350 on 1GB of RAM. An Athlon and MB combo with 256MB or so of RAM could be had for probably the cost of their CPU alone. They could have then spent the rest of their budget wisely, by buying a high-performance RAID controller.
The problem is their idiotic dual-purpose requirement. Storage servers aren't workstations and vice versa. High CPU performance isn't a requirement for speedy file-serving: High performance hard drives and a high-performance caching RAID controller do that. Putting a gigabit Ethernet card in the server and hooking it to a switch with a decent bandwidth will do more to speed up your file fetches than putting a 3 GHz P4 on the MB.
The guy you knew in middle school who hated Macs for no apparent reason.
Middle school? Hell, when I was in middle school, the Mac wasn't even a twinkle in Jef Raskin's eye yet. Steve and Steve were still living high on the Apple ][ hog. The ill-fated Apple III and Lisa hadn't even embarrassed the company yet. The Mac finally shipped during my junior year of high school, and the only reason to hate it then was it cost so damn much.
Come to think of it, annoying Apple zealotry aside, price is still the only reason I haven't bought a Mac.
I agree that if I'd bought one of those things and it started redirecting my traffic, I'd consider it defective and demand my money back. Belkin's really moronic to think that this won't backfire on them and result in an expensive class-action lawsuit. Maybe they can defuse a lawsuit by offering refunds to anyone who's upset at the feature, but I'm guessing they're too sold on their own flawed logic to understand that what they did is not going to be seen as anything other than making the product do something its owners didn't ask it to do, and that Belkin didn't tell them it would do.
I can smell the class-action attorneys lining up now.
FYI, the extended version of LotR:FotR was much more satisfying than the theatrical release. The characters were better developed, the story flowed better and the viewer got more involved. That's saying a lot, because the original theatrical release of FoTR was damn good.
For LotR:TTT, a lot of stuff got left out of the theatrical release simply because of economics: Movie theaters don't like movies longer than three hours because they can't turn over the audiences fast enough to make money. Movie studios despise movies longer than three hours for the same reason. Peter Jackson was able to make a great movie out of the material he'd shot for TTT and release it to theaters at an acceptable length. Now, he's putting back in the material he really wanted to put in the movie in the first place and releasing it to DVD for the people who want to see the whole movie.
Oh, and for those who think that adding material to a movie only makes it longer, please keep in mind the example of Apocalypse Now Redux, which contains 45 minutes of new footage, but actually feels shorter than the original movie. It's hard to explain, but in the original theatrical release of Apocalypse Now most of the last half of the movie proceeds at a slow, throbbing tempo, which seems to take forever. The new footage actually breaks up what was the second half of the movie into a lot of interesting segments. When the movie's over, it doesn't seem to have taken as long because it didn't lull you to sleep with so much unbroken slowness.
No, I was most definitely not defending MS's poor security performance. I merely pointed out that even as shoddy as MS's security efforts have been to date, even they haven't attempted to get away with something as stupid as telling their customers "Pay $129 to get the latest security fixes."
A) shipped Panther and B) were informed of the bug after A)
Please tell me how Apple fixed security problems before they were informed of them? Public disclosure does not equal initial notification. Security researchers routinely privately notify software companies of their discoveries of flaws and then allow those companies time to fix the flaws before they publicly disclose them. In return, the software companies state in their press releases, something to the effect of, "XYZ software thanks Foo Bar of Baz Security Research for discovering this flaw."
As for Microsoft, they sure as hell fixed bugs in NT 4 after Win2k shipped, as well as after XP shipped - and NT4 is EOL, so they won't fix any more bugs that are found, and there will be more bugs found in NT4.
Clearly, you're speaking as someone who doesn't bother actually reading security notices or reading discussions on security-related mailing lists. Of course MS discovered and fixed security bugs in NT 4.0 after Win2k and XP shipped. My point was that MS frequently releases patches to existing products based on fixes to the code base that were discovered while developing new products. Microsoft has the same arrangement with security researchers that Apple does: Let us know privately about any flaws and when we finish the patch, we'll publicly give you credit for finding the flaw. This is done to give MS or Apple time to develop, test and release a patch before exploit code gets out "in the wild."
And yes, MS has EOL'd NT 4.0, but that product is seven years old, as opposed to Jaguar, which is about a year old. You can't compare MS's decision to stop patching NT with Apple's initial reluctance to patch Jaguar. I have never heard of MS deciding to hold off on releasing a fix until a new OS version ships and then not getting around to simultaneously releasing the fix for the formerly-current-now-previous version. Even if Apple did plan to patch Jaguar all along and this is a colossal misunderstanding, their inability to coordinate updates for Jaguar and Panther simultaneously doesn't speak well of their security efforts.
I'm guessing the director of research at a leading security company is not going to bother with clueless tech support droids. I'd suspect he has a direct line to the people responsible for security issues with the various OS products. It's highly probable the person he spoke to was reasonably well-informed. Does that mean that the person he spoke to was definitely in the loop? Possibly not. However, I'd suspect if that person didn't know, they might just say, "I don't know what the plans are at this point," as opposed to saying they weren't planning to port those security updates back to Jaguar.
And keep in mind, here, that the quote wasn't, "They didn't know of any plans," it was "they weren't going to." It's possible that Goldsmith misunderstood what he was told or exaggerated what he was told, but security researchers depend on their reputations, so I think they tend to be careful about overstating such things. Again, keep in mind that Goldsmith said, "I wouldn't be surprised if they change that," which shows that he wasn't trying to make more of it than there was.
However, none of this changes the fact that Apple initially planned not to backport the fixes to Jaguar. Apple zealots can stop trying to rewrite history after the fact.
According to David Goldsmith of @Stake, "In my initial conversations with them [Apple], they said they weren't going to fix 10.2, but I wouldn't be surprised if they change that."
In other words, this isn't just some sort of overblown speculation run amok. Apple did initially tell security experts they didn't plan to patch Jaguar. That was a stupid plan, and even the security experts didn't expect that to last, but that doesn't change the fact that someone from Apple did claim Jaguar wouldn't be patched.
What I find amusing is the fact that Apple zealots are using this story and its development as further evidence in the conspiracy against Apple, when even the much-hated (and deservedly so) Microsoft has been known to back-port security and even many stability patches to the current and previous versions of their OSes as they're working on their next generation products. Does anybody remember that MS backported lots of fixes to NT 4.0 in SP5 and SP6 based on work they'd done developing Win2k?
Unlike Apple, however, MS didn't make NT 4.0 users wait until after Win2k shipped before bothering to release the fixes for NT 4.0. Jaguar users shouldn't have had to wait until after Panther shipped to get those security fixes. They're still waiting, aren't they?
This is what happened at Three Mile Island (TMI)- they lost the water. They melted parts of their core, but that was the extent of the meltdown. The reactor vessel did it's job and physically contained the uranium. The containment building did it's job, along with all the auxillary systems, and no appreciable radiation was released to the public. TMI proved that we can handle a disaster without endangering the public.
The History Channel just ran a show about both TMI and Chernobyl. They didn't go into quite as much technical detail about Chernobyl as you did, but they went into a lot more detail about TMI than you did. The core was only partially melted because, eventually, the designers of the reactor (Babcock & Wilcox) were able to get through to the control room at TMI in time and tell the plant managers to turn the water pumps back on.
Had B&W not been able to get through to the control room at TMI, the core would have eventually melted down completely, leading to a "China Syndrome" where the molten core would have hit the water table and sent radioactive steam shooting up from the ground in the nearby area.
Another danger at TMI was the buildup of hydrogen gas in the containment building. Left alone, this buildup could have eventually led to an explosion that would have blown the top off the containment building.
None of these bad things happened, but that does not mean that TMI's design was inherently safe. There were a number of flaws in the design at TMI. Many of them had to do with how the plant was instrumented. A pressure relieve valve's status only indicated that a command to close the valve had been sent. It did not actually indicate whether the valve had closed (it had not). The core coolant levels were measured indirectly, by making deductions based on steam temperature and pressure, leading to incorrect readings when water was not present in the system.
In short, nothing is more dangerous than to make unwarranted assumptions about something being safe. Everything is dangerous to some extent. Failure to appreciate risks is the fastest way to disaster.
DirecTV TiVos won't do anything in the way of recording unless you pay for the $4.99 a month TiVo fee. But then, if you're not going to use a DirecTV TiVo as a TiVo, then what's the point of buying one in the first place?
BTW: That $4.99 a month covers all the TiVos you connect to your dish (up to 8). Each additional TiVo only gets charged the usual $5 a month "mirroring" fee that you'd pay for any DirecTV receiver.
Those USB ports are practically useless.
Rumor has it that DirecTV will finally roll out the 4.0 software and the Home Media Option sometime before the end of the year or in the first quarter of next year.
Keep in mind that nothing's official here, and all bets could be off the minute Rupert Murdoch gets his grubby fingers on DirecTV.
I also went out and snagged one at lunch. The receipt does say something about being a "new DirecTV customer," but the salesdroid swore up and down there's no new-customer-only requirement. He did say that if I didn't activate it within 30 days, they'll hit my credit card for another $150, so I'm guessing the 12 month activation hit is the big deal here.
BTW: For anyone curious about DirecTV's 12 month commitments, they are not cumulative. This means you can buy a DirecTV and get it installed free, buy a TiVo receiver a couple of weeks later, and move a month after that (and take advantage of the DirecTV move offer), and only the most recent 12 month commitment applies.
Okay, because you asked for it, here are the major differences between Series 1 and Series 2 standalone devices:
Series 1
Series 2
There are people who've successfully hacked the Series 2 TiVos by replacing the BIOS with one that has the signature-check edited out, but that requires soldering, which is more than most TiVophiles are comfortable with.
In contrast, people with Series 1 devices have added ethernet cards, installed more RAM, installed Apache and a full web-based UI for programming TiVo, etc.
I own a couple of Series 1 standalone TiVos, but don't own any Series 2 standalones. I do own an HDVR2, which is the second generation DirecTV-integrated model. I haven't done anything to it yet.
Ask any cook worth his/her pinch of salt and they'll tell you that non-stick pans are not good for a lot of things. Specifically, any time you want to cook a meat to a nice brown color and then make a sauce, you specifically don't want a non-stick pan. You actually want little bits of the meat to stick to your pan as you cook.
Why, you ask? Because, those little bits that stick to the pan undergo something called the Maillard reaction (similar to sugars caramelizing) which results in deliciously complex flavors you can't get otherwise. Plus, when you're done cooking the meat, you can deglaze those little stuck bits with some water, alcohol, vegetable or fruit juice and the deglazed bits will form the basis of your sauce.
That's one of the reasons why chefs will pay $200 and up for a clad saute pan that appears to be stainless steel (definitely not non-stick).
I don't think Forbes has a reputation for particularly honest or fair reporting.
If that's true, then the feedback I just sent them will be water off a duck's back. Heavy sigh.
I've been testing Mozilla since the 0.6 release, I think, and I switched to it as my primary browser just before it went to 1.0. The straw that finally broke the camel's back was that IE couldn't properly render sites that were being Borg'd into MSN (i.e., ESPN). Mozilla had no such problems.
Tabbed browsing and popup-blocking were merely the icing on the cake, but now that I use Mozilla as my primary browser, I cringe when I'm forced to use IE for anything.
It isn't *just* that he sent thousands of spams. He allegedly hacked into others' PCs and sent the spams from them. Doing so with a bogus return address would have been bad enough, but he allegedly forged return addresses to redirect bounces to Philadelphia sportswriters. Unlike most spammers, this guy had an axe to grind, which made him far more traceable. Also, unlike most spammers, he attacked a very targeted group of people.
The clown involved in this mess is well known on the rec.sport.baseball newsgroup (and presumably in the Phillies newsgroup, as well). Nobody there is shedding a tear over his apprehension. He's a crank and a racist and nobody will miss his lunatic rants.
That said, if he were just a crank and a racist and hadn't done anything specifically illegal, this would be a good time to complain about the preferential treatment received by some in our society. But this particular case is about a guy who broke the law and did so in a way that pointed the finger right back at him. I have a hard time feeling outraged on his behalf.
NASA has an escalation process, if these engineers *really* felt there was a problem, all they had to do was push that button.
Did you, or did you not actually read the article?
The reason I ask is because it's clear from the article that the engineers did attempt to escalate things and their efforts were squashed. And let's be clear about something: NASA has a very limited supply of shuttle orbiters and an even more limited supply of public support (and Congressional funding) if they lose any more of those orbiters (and the people in them).
It is therefore of paramount importance that NASA engineers consider the possible catastrophic consequences of all sorts of failures, and it's vitally important that NASA managers realize the consequences that can result from their actions and pay the proper amount of attention to concerns raised by engineers that state a possibility of catastrophic loss.
NASA had clearly forgotten the lessons of Challenger because they discovered the day before Columbia was to launch that an important component already mounted on Columbia had failed to meet minimum standards. Instead of replacing the component, NASA managers opted to grant a temporary waiver allowing the component to fly. This is exactly the sort of behavior we should never again see at NASA.
Yes, space travel and exploration are dangerous, but the American public won't stand for repeated losses of complex, expensive spacecraft, even if they're willing to sacrifice the crews (which they're not, by and large). This isn't combat. Unforeseeable losses--caused by such things as sudden solar flares, meteoroids or orbital debris from the recent failure of a spacecraft or launch vehicle from another country--could be excused. Foreseeable losses cannot.
Man, are you reaching.
Laura DiDio knows Sontag and McBride, not Stowell and McBride, and she's known them for 15 years since they all worked for Novell.
While her prior relationships with Sontag and McBride don't exactly encourage her to view them suspiciously, her reputation as an analyst is at stake if she doesn't hold Sontag and McBride to the same standards (higher, perhaps) as others whom she reports on and offers opinions about.
In other words, just because she knows them from having worked at Novell, doesn't mean she's in bed with them to scare the world into paying SCO huge sums of money. Far more likely is that she believed what she was told because SCO told her a compelling story. That story may only be half true (i.e., the code's the same, but SCO didn't own the code, anyway), but she has no way of knowing that.
Sadly, in a democracy, "right" or "wrong" is irrelevant. It's what the majority wants that counts.
Now, strictly speaking, the US isn't a democracy. Ancient Athens was a democracy, and the voters decided everything of importance directly, much the way Californians vote at nearly every election to decide things their legislature probably could have handled for them.
The US is a democratic republic where the voters are represented by legislators who vote on their behalf. Those legislators are only beholden to honor the wishes of their constituents as long as they care about getting re-elected.
Unfortunately, in the US, those legislators are usually more concerned with getting re-elected than they are with doing what's right or even what their constituents want. So we get government-by-special-interest, where legislators push the agendas of their biggest contributors.
So, back to the original point: In any popular vote, whether the majority is right or wrong is irrelevant. They get what they want. Only people of conscience voting against what they think is wrong--regardless of the consequences--can hope to derail a wrong-headed majority.
Also, in the US, there's this little thing called the Constitution. It's very difficult to change the Constitution and the Constitution can be damnably inconvenient when the majority wants a law passed that discriminates against a specific minority. But, as we've seen in the past, even the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution can be swayed by conventional wisdom of the day. Dredd Scott, anyone?
Translation: We implemented something that may have broken large parts of the Internet, but we'll wait until everyone has given up on us fixing it before we decide whether to undo what we did.
By the time they decide if they really broke everything they broke, and whether they should temporarily suspend SiteFinder, everybody else will have routed around them.
BTW: Does anybody know what they're talking about when they claim that other TLDs have implemented something like SiteFinder?
Wouldn't this require more complex in-orbit acrobatics to join the cargo and crew craft?
This kind of orbital rendezvous and docking is incredibly old hat and is so relatively simple that it's literally automated. Russian Progress cargo ships automatically found and docked with the Mir space station. The near misses and collisions that finally crippled Mir were caused by tests of using humans to remotely pilot the Progress modules to Mir. Progress cargo ships also are used to resupply the ISS while the shuttle is grounded.
And don't forget that orbital rendezvous has been around since the days of Gemini and orbital docking was required for the Apollo program (the LM's ascent stage had to dock with the CSM so the crew could return to Earth).
This is by no means a more advanced form of rocket science than is already happening on every ISS mission
.The tiles all have to be reglued, things have to be towed out of the ocean, etc...
While your sentiment is correct (the orbiter is barely reusable), your details aren't. The orbiter loses tiles (I don't know exact numbers, but they're in the low hundreds at the very highest and most likely less than a hundred) every mission, but a small percentage compared to the thousands that are attached to the shuttle.
What really makes a mockery of the "reusable" tag is the fact that the shuttle's main engines are pulled and refurbed after every flight. Each shuttle mission involves a different cluster of engines than the one before it--even on the same orbiter.
Even so, it's not the barely reusable nature of the shuttle that makes it so hideously expensive to operate: It's the fact that the shuttle was designed to serve too many masters in the first place. NASA couldn't find the budget to build the shuttle by itself, so it co-opted the Air Force into providing funding for the shuttle's development. But doing so ensured that the shuttle orbiter would be huge, in order to drag gigantic KH-11 spy satellites into orbit. This drove up the cost of development, drove up the launch costs and made the beast even more complex than it could have been.
The current concepts for an "orbital space plane" that'll just haul people to and from orbit is a great idea. It should be dramatically cheaper to launch and operate safely. Heavy lifters for orbital cargo are also a good idea. Separating the people from payload makes sense. The payload doesn't have to be sent up on a human-rated booster system, and the people-carrier can be as small as it needs to be.
Hey, I used to work for a company where we had about 200 PC users and 30 Mac users. The Mac users were self-supporting (they had to be--the IT dept had no Mac support resources), yet I still found myself helping out down in the Mac area on occasion. For PC support, we had: Me. We had a help-desk, but most of the help desk was dedicated to supporting our in-house order-entry and order-fulfillment applications. We had a phone admin/sysadmin responsible for Novell, I helped out some on Novell and Unix, and we had Unix admin work being done by our programmers.
Yet, in spite of the fact that the ratio was one guy for 200 PCs to nobody for 30 Macs, the real support burden was on about 4 or 5 Mac users, and they were, to put it mildly, getting really pissed off at their Macs. Their Macs crashed a lot. This was in the days of Mac OS 7.x when Apple claimed that Copland would fix everything.
On the PC side, we were running some OS/2, some MS-DOS/WfWg 3.11, some DR-DOS and some Novell DOS. The Windows users suffered from typical Windows lousiness, but when NT 4.0 came into the company, the Mac users seriously considered switching to NT.
It never happened, for whatever reason, but that's how fed up the Mac users were at the time. Keep in mind that before Mac OS X brought NeXTStep/BSD goodness to the Mac world, Apple's Copland initiative would have only brought Macs to the level of Windows 95 (in terms of memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking).
Now that Macs have OS X, I'm willing to consider them, but good luck getting any of the apps I need to run on them.
IBM is [another] hardware vendor.
Perhaps you should have gone back and read the original article, instead of simply commenting on a quote taken out of context. The original article stated that the Deutsche Bank analyst was told the code he saw was specifically not from IBM, but from another Unix hardware vendor, and that they were pretty clear they didn't mean IBM or Sun.
There aren't a lot of other Unix hardware vendors these days, although a few years ago, there were plenty. Ironically, though the NUMA and other code didn't originally come from IBM--it came from Sequent, which is now owned by IBM. Hence, SCO could be lying by omission. If the code came from Sequent, IBM still owns it.