Wake me up when that is 800GB to a few TB. Then you can say. This might shock you to learn but some business uses their databases to drive more than just web forums.
You can already put a TB of RAM into a server if you want. If you really need to have that amount of data with next to zero latency, then the cost (which is still relatively low) is unlikely to be much of a stumbling block.
It clearly will shock you to learn that most databases are well under a couple of hundred GB in size.
Given how trivial and relatively cheap it is to put 192GB+ RAM into a server these days, there's a lot of truth in that statement, whether you like it or not.
It wasn't mainstream until the late 90's early 00's.
Yes it was. I can distinctly remember noticing the difference in advertised vs usable space on the first hard disk I owned - a "huge" 40MB that I had to partition because DOS 3.x had a max partition size of 32MB.
I don't disagree the practice lies somewhere between dishonest and deceptive, but it's been commonplace for at least twenty years. It most certainly did not change when you think it did, though it may have reached renewed attention with the general increase in computer usage around that time.
RAID is pretty common for HDDs, because drives do fail and RAID gives you instant (for RAID1) and automatic recovery. Is there a point to have SSDs in RAID?
Yes. You RAID SSDs for exactly the same reason(s) you RAID hard disks.
While it should be fairly trivial, you also have to worry whether the vendor of a proprietary OS sees a business interest in making it more difficult or dangerous than it needs to be.
If you want to get technical about it, NT has never not supported some 64-bit architecture (though I'm too lazy to check the RAM limits).
Windows NT (as released) prior to Windows 2003 was 32-bit only. It ran on 64-bit platforms (DEC Alpha), but in a 32-bit mode.
The first version of Windows NT to have a 64-bit version was Windows 2000, with a 64-bit Alpha port that made it all the way to either beta 2 or release candidate (can't remember offhand) before being canned.
I was *mad* the when I got burned by that change in the early 00's, and I feel that companies can't change the old term to GiB to rip people off.
You might have been mad, but it wasn't because you got "burned". Base-10 units for storage medium sizes have been in place since drives were being measured in double-figures of MB - at least the early '90s.
Those kinds of things America works real well at because they take SOCIAL SKILLS. It involves dealing with controversy, arguments, and idiots on un-named web message boards.
And America is the king of social skills. We teach people how to get along without the rule of an Iron Fist.
America's definition of "compromise" is "our way or the highway". It's not social skills you're good at, it's might makes right.
I can assure you that any "credit score" you might have in another country is utterly irrelevant to banks and lending facilities within the US, and I see little reason to believe it is any different going in the opposite direction.
I think white-collar workers have it far too easy.
I think you're making an irrelevant and arbitrary distinction to be an apologist for employers with massive entitlement complexes.
"Look how much worse those guys over there have it" is not a justification for sustaining a bad situation here.
Just to recap
Just to recap, your entire argument is a non-sequitur. No-one is arguing having a computer at work to do with what you will is a human right. We are arguing that being able to deal with your life outside of work, while at work, without being spied on, fired, or even just made to feel guilty is the environment that every worker in every job should be in.
Should the driver API be stable? Usually not: a long term stable API means that it's hard to make changes when necessary. For example, the Linux USB subsystem has been substantially re-written 4 times. This is never a problem, because when someone changes the kernel API, they also are responsible for updating all drivers in the tree that are affected by it. It means that Linux's USB support isn't hamstrung by lots of legacy cruft.
This is simply a comment on how poorly the design of components in Linux is done in the first place.
Should the ABI be stable? No. This breaks pretty much every time the kernel is compiled. The solution: recompile the drivers.
Only on Linux. Other OSes manage just fine.
The argument for a stable ABI is rather like the (claimed) USP of Java: write once, run anywhere. The thing is, if you can recompile on your target platform, that advantage disappears. Why would anyone care about binary compatibility if they can have source-compatibility?
Because you can't always guarantee access to a compiler, to highlight but one obvious reason.
Aside: there is a very different logic with the Posix (system-call) API between userspace and kernel space. This means that, for example, fopen() works exactly the same way now that it did 20 years ago.
Didn't you just spend a few paragraphs telling us how this sort of "legacy cruft" "hamstrings" new development ?
So that's why hardware on Windows isn't supported from one major release to the next?
No, that's because they're major releases, when it's OK for the ABI to change. Again, something that every other remotely OS manages quite well.
Like anything else, what you are talking about sounds great in theory but doesn't actaully work out in practice. So the situation with the alternatives is not nearly as superior as one would be led to believe.
Yes it does, and yes it is. Drivers breaking between minor revisions within a major release is very uncommon on pretty much every platform except Linux.
Heck, it's not unusual to see drivers working across even major revisions.
Every other major OS does not in fact have a "stable driver ABI".
Windows, OS X (more recent versions, at least), Solaris, FreeBSD, etc. It's a struggle to find any remotely major OS other than Linux without stable ABIs.
You don't seem to understand the fuedal system - peasants wern't paid and in general couldn't leave.
Ah. You mean like employees who don't have the financial support to arbitrarily leave their jobs and survive for an unknown period of time without income ?
And what makes you think there is a technical argument in support of caching raid controllers? Just asking.
The point of things like caching RAID controllers, SAN arrays, and the like, is that they create a general solution that doesn't need specialised hardware or software to deliver benefits, and for the latter that they provide shared storage. That is the technical argument in their favour.
Damn near every high performance disk system on the planet uses some sort of transparent-to-the-upper-layers caching mechanism.
Unless you are telling me that you will condone a small amount of your personal details leaking as long as it facilitates an easier work environment for those employees? You willing to put up your financial data?
This is called a non-sequitur.
2) You're not seriously suggesting two workstations for each employee to allow them personal use on one of them?
Environments with high security and low security workstations at each desk are not uncommon.
As for the employee... too fucking bad.
Precisely how I feel about the employer trying to slave drive his employees.
I don't know what else to say about that. Some employees work so hard they still need government assistance. I'm willing to bet though that if you are in a company that has networks and workstations, that your employees are not so freakin poor they can't afford a smartphone or tablet.
Then you need to get out more. There are, believe it or not, still people who deal with their money responsibly, and plenty of office workers who barely make enough to pay for food, rent, and ~10% savings on top of that.
Non work related personal sites can absolutely be a vector for malware. Personal email, especially so. Just what part of multi-billion dollar malware business do you not understand? Large scale espionage from foreign countries?
Your argument could be considered a decent justification for a whitelist-based proxying system or an air-gap environment. *Those* are solutions addressing security risks.
It is not a justification for hacking into people's HTTPS sessions, or otherwise covertly monitoring them. Those are solutions for invading people's privacy and fishing expeditions.
What about if you're viewing or downloading content that can get them into trouble like porn (which can get them a harassment complaint from someone who sees a coworker's porn), downloading and/or sharing pirated content (employers that look the other way can face liability), child porn, etc.
That is a _completely_ different situation to spending time on personal matters and not even playing the same game as the original topic of hacking into HTTPS connections.
Stop trying to disingenuously conflate things. No-one is arguing people should be able to fire up a youporn session and have a wank at their desk.
It seems like you're saying it should be OK to spend an hour or so goofing off as long as you actually do some work (4 or 5 hours?).
No, I'm saying if your employer pays you to do X, and you do X, then whether you do it in 7 hours of "work" and 1 hour of "goofing off" or vice-versa, is irrelevant.
It is NOT snooping to secure the network against data leakage. You seem to forget that the corporate network is not there to facilitate their personal lives. It is there to service customers.
You are conflating separate issues.
If your data security is that important, then utilise physically separate networks and workstations with an air gap.
As far as snooping into your personal life, the guest wireless is not monitored so your concerns are baseless.
Not every employer has a guest wireless. Not every employee has the means to use it.
It is not reasonable, nor is it part of finding a balance, to use corporate equipment on corporate networks in a way that can endanger the company.
I have yet to see anyone arguing it is.
I do, however, see a lot of people trying to conflate "security" with "not letting employees do anything that isn't work related".
The first three are off topic here - whether what you are doing is allowed or not doesn't matter. "Don't use your employer's network if you don't want them to watch what you do." I don't see how it could be any simpler.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
That seems pretty simple as well.
They provide the resources and a paycheck. If you don't like their policies, quit. If you can't quit, you're stuck.
Ah. Just like fuedal lords used to be generous enough to provide land and pay, and if you didn't like it you left ?
If you do decide you have to take care of it, and it involves an internet connection, don't expect that monitoring will be turned off. If you don't accept that risk, you have the traditional solutions. Call instead of using a website, ask for emergency time off, quit, or whatever else you can think of to avoid being snooped.
Or expect that your employer will treat you with basic human dignity.
The _only_ time an employer has a moral leg to stand on is if you're spending so much time on non-work activities you are unable to complete your assigned duties. Anything else is just flat out abuse.
At my employer, we don't really care if you're using Facebook or other "personal use" on your lunch break or occasionally during the day, but where we draw the line is excessive use or browsing porn because the company has a real liability if someone is browsing porn at their desk, and an employee sees it and makes claim for being in a 'hostile workplace'.
And I doubt any reasonable person would consider this unreasonable.
If you're using facebook for an hour a day, no one cares. But if you're using social networking sites for 6 hours/day, you're going to come under more scrutiny.
If you're using social networking sites for 6 hours a day, then you're clearly not going to be able to perform your work duties. If you _are_ able to complete your work duties, then the fact you're spending 6 hours a day on Facebook is irrelevant.
The scenario you are describing is a failing of the manager, not the employee.
Call me a subservient scum if you want to, but if people could be trusted to not abuse personal internet use, we wouldn't have to monitor it. The vast majority of employees don't abuse it, but there's that small percentage that ruin it for everyone.
I call you subservient scum not because you are looking for the minority, but because you are using their actions to try and morally justify intrusive monitoring of everybody.
You are no different to the "think of the children" or the "if it catches one terrorist it was worth it" brigades. You're just operating on a smaller scale.
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You need an SSN to get an AZ driver's license.
You can already put a TB of RAM into a server if you want. If you really need to have that amount of data with next to zero latency, then the cost (which is still relatively low) is unlikely to be much of a stumbling block.
It clearly will shock you to learn that most databases are well under a couple of hundred GB in size.
Given how trivial and relatively cheap it is to put 192GB+ RAM into a server these days, there's a lot of truth in that statement, whether you like it or not.
Yes it was. I can distinctly remember noticing the difference in advertised vs usable space on the first hard disk I owned - a "huge" 40MB that I had to partition because DOS 3.x had a max partition size of 32MB.
I don't disagree the practice lies somewhere between dishonest and deceptive, but it's been commonplace for at least twenty years. It most certainly did not change when you think it did, though it may have reached renewed attention with the general increase in computer usage around that time.
Yes. You RAID SSDs for exactly the same reason(s) you RAID hard disks.
What's your use case ?
Not if you're sane, you don't.
No it didn't. A 64-bit Alpha port made it to very late in the development cycle, but was not released.
The first 64-bit version of Windows released was 2003 for Itanium.
Windows NT (as released) prior to Windows 2003 was 32-bit only. It ran on 64-bit platforms (DEC Alpha), but in a 32-bit mode.
The first version of Windows NT to have a 64-bit version was Windows 2000, with a 64-bit Alpha port that made it all the way to either beta 2 or release candidate (can't remember offhand) before being canned.
You might have been mad, but it wasn't because you got "burned". Base-10 units for storage medium sizes have been in place since drives were being measured in double-figures of MB - at least the early '90s.
Those kinds of things America works real well at because they take SOCIAL SKILLS. It involves dealing with controversy, arguments, and idiots on un-named web message boards.
And America is the king of social skills. We teach people how to get along without the rule of an Iron Fist.
America's definition of "compromise" is "our way or the highway". It's not social skills you're good at, it's might makes right.
I can assure you that any "credit score" you might have in another country is utterly irrelevant to banks and lending facilities within the US, and I see little reason to believe it is any different going in the opposite direction.
The distinction is completely arbitrary.
Yes. It's completely irrelevant to the topic at hand (for multiple reasons).
I think you're making an irrelevant and arbitrary distinction to be an apologist for employers with massive entitlement complexes.
"Look how much worse those guys over there have it" is not a justification for sustaining a bad situation here.
Just to recap, your entire argument is a non-sequitur. No-one is arguing having a computer at work to do with what you will is a human right. We are arguing that being able to deal with your life outside of work, while at work, without being spied on, fired, or even just made to feel guilty is the environment that every worker in every job should be in.
This is simply a comment on how poorly the design of components in Linux is done in the first place.
Only on Linux. Other OSes manage just fine.
Because you can't always guarantee access to a compiler, to highlight but one obvious reason.
Didn't you just spend a few paragraphs telling us how this sort of "legacy cruft" "hamstrings" new development ?
No, that's because they're major releases, when it's OK for the ABI to change. Again, something that every other remotely OS manages quite well.
Yes it does, and yes it is. Drivers breaking between minor revisions within a major release is very uncommon on pretty much every platform except Linux.
Heck, it's not unusual to see drivers working across even major revisions.
Windows, OS X (more recent versions, at least), Solaris, FreeBSD, etc. It's a struggle to find any remotely major OS other than Linux without stable ABIs.
So you don't think disks should have any caching on them at all ? Have you ever tried running a drive with all caching disabled ?
Ah. You mean like employees who don't have the financial support to arbitrarily leave their jobs and survive for an unknown period of time without income ?
The point of things like caching RAID controllers, SAN arrays, and the like, is that they create a general solution that doesn't need specialised hardware or software to deliver benefits, and for the latter that they provide shared storage. That is the technical argument in their favour.
Damn near every high performance disk system on the planet uses some sort of transparent-to-the-upper-layers caching mechanism.
No it's not.
This is called a non-sequitur.
Environments with high security and low security workstations at each desk are not uncommon.
Precisely how I feel about the employer trying to slave drive his employees.
Then you need to get out more. There are, believe it or not, still people who deal with their money responsibly, and plenty of office workers who barely make enough to pay for food, rent, and ~10% savings on top of that.
Your argument could be considered a decent justification for a whitelist-based proxying system or an air-gap environment. *Those* are solutions addressing security risks.
It is not a justification for hacking into people's HTTPS sessions, or otherwise covertly monitoring them. Those are solutions for invading people's privacy and fishing expeditions.
That is a _completely_ different situation to spending time on personal matters and not even playing the same game as the original topic of hacking into HTTPS connections.
Stop trying to disingenuously conflate things. No-one is arguing people should be able to fire up a youporn session and have a wank at their desk.
No, I'm saying if your employer pays you to do X, and you do X, then whether you do it in 7 hours of "work" and 1 hour of "goofing off" or vice-versa, is irrelevant.
You are conflating separate issues.
If your data security is that important, then utilise physically separate networks and workstations with an air gap.
Not every employer has a guest wireless. Not every employee has the means to use it.
I have yet to see anyone arguing it is.
I do, however, see a lot of people trying to conflate "security" with "not letting employees do anything that isn't work related".
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
That seems pretty simple as well.
Ah. Just like fuedal lords used to be generous enough to provide land and pay, and if you didn't like it you left ?
Or expect that your employer will treat you with basic human dignity.
The _only_ time an employer has a moral leg to stand on is if you're spending so much time on non-work activities you are unable to complete your assigned duties. Anything else is just flat out abuse.
And I doubt any reasonable person would consider this unreasonable.
If you're using social networking sites for 6 hours a day, then you're clearly not going to be able to perform your work duties. If you _are_ able to complete your work duties, then the fact you're spending 6 hours a day on Facebook is irrelevant.
The scenario you are describing is a failing of the manager, not the employee.
I call you subservient scum not because you are looking for the minority, but because you are using their actions to try and morally justify intrusive monitoring of everybody.
You are no different to the "think of the children" or the "if it catches one terrorist it was worth it" brigades. You're just operating on a smaller scale.