Funny story, but generally believed to be an urban legend.
Of note, 'no va' means doesn't move, nova is not the same as no va.
As one site pointed out, would think it strange to buy a dining set with the name 'notable' because it means 'no table'?
Re:I will never set foot in Best Buy again.
on
Best Buy Sued By Ohio
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I hate to say it, but in this case the seller is in a tricky circumstance. Customer comes in mad about his TV being broke that was sent to him as a replacement. The TV in question has obvious physical damage that a customer is claiming to have simply not noticed for 4 months. Sounds too fishy. Now if you had immediately checked and seen it, no excuse, but there is a serious amount of reasonable doubt here.
Huh? Umm, no, clusters are heavily used for supercomputing. Take a glance at the top500 and see for yourself. With high-speed interconnects (i.e. infiniband/myrinet), it is very feasible.
But there are two things: 1) Required dependencies are discovered later and are a pain in the ass when you waste time to discover you need to backtrack 2) Optional dependencies you forget and want to make use of later.
I like gentoo, that's all I have to say about all that.
One, it's fire*fox*. Two, I seriously doubt they are going to revert to the monolithic mozilla name for each app. Perhaps in the future mozilla will be a term to refer to a suite assembled of firefox, sunbird, and thunderbird, but you can wager the components will retain those names to maintain distinct identity, cash in on name recognition, and, frankly, most people find the name 'firefox' cooler. True example, I was hearing complaints about IE crap problems, and I recommended mozilla, and they shrugged it off as a geek-only browser, so then I said firefox, and they thought to try it, was actually swayed by things as petty as the nicely designed icon (looks like a fox humping the world if you ask me, but a nice looking fox humping a nice looking world at least). Now, he is almost exclusively using firefox.
Probably a problem discovered during 2003 testing, that, ultimately, was determined to be in XP. Happens a lot in testing that an incidental find sticks with the original summary even after finding it applies to other things.
All joking aside, 1280x1024 is the abomination of resolutions. Whoever first did that should be beaten. Why in the world did this resolution come to exist and now damn us with so many LCDs with that native resolution?
For those not aware, divide the width by height on the common resultions, all are 4/3 except 1280x1024 (5/4), with 1280x960 being the closest good-ratio resolution. The net of it being something designed for 1280x1024 looks strangely tall on a sane resolution, and something designed for sane resolutions looks vertically short on 1280x1024.
I have resolved to ban any device with 1280x1024 as the native resolution. It just irks me too much.
This is not for 'enthusiasts', this is for businesses. The cost of maintaining old, failing hardware grows exponentially as both hardware problems become more frequent and availability of 'vintage' parts decreases. A businesses bottom line is hurt dramatically if they have applications that only run on the old hardware and by extension, feel a need to run that old hardware just because their core business requires the apps.
Of course, someone actually has to *write* an emulator, and if no third party steps up to do so, that would be a harder task than porting your old applications. If the antiquated system, in retrospect, turned out to be pretty mainstream and therefore modern emulators were written with the platform in mind, you are in luck. However, if a business picked an ultimate loser in the marketplace no one cared about, the chances of an emulator existing, and indeed being worthwhile to produce at all, are slim.
ARRGG... I really *HATE* the widespread use of "Inexpensive Disks' as the last part of RAID. It doesn't make sense, *NOTHING* about the strategy requires/suggests that the objects are either cheap or even traditional disks.
Redundant Array of Independent Devices just makes more sense, but I can never find which phrase was coined first, though I know I personally heard this latter version before the 'inexpensive disks' crap.
Not quite. In that case, the subject matter being parodied was directly Barbie (at least in part it was demonstrably a direct parody of Barbie). Very clearly and understandbly direct.
In this case, the song is not being parodied, it is being manipulated to parody Kerry and Bush. Since it is not a direct subject of the parody, and only used as a means to parody something else, it is quite possibly not a protected use. The expectation is that if you are going to parody, you have to use your own material to do so.
This same issue came up for a Penny Arcade comic that used Strawberry Shortcake characters to parody American McGee. In that case as in this one, the characters were not being parodied, but used *in* a parody. Though Penny Arcade backed down well before going to court on that comic, it is generally thought they would have lost. Shortly after, they did a comic directly parodying American Greetings for their trouble, and never received notification to take it down (under a claim such as 'defamation of character' or some such) so the lawyers probably acknowledged that as a direct parody and protected speech.
All that said, it *MAY* be possible to show that the song is at least partially directly parodying the orignal song. One segment that comes clear to my mind in this context is the Native American saying 'this land was my land', which does directly parody the spirit and meaning behind the song. There are other places, but if I was going to fight that in their shoes, I would think that would be a good focus point to demonstrate that it is in part a direct, protected parody.
A plumber in pakistan isn't installing pipes in my house in the USA, the comparison is not valid. The issue with IT is that remotely administering networks/systems is entirely within the realm of possibility. With nothing more than a skeleton crew local to keep that connection alive, a skeleton crew that can even be shared by different companies, the bulk of IT tasks can be done overseas. Plumbers don't have to worry about hordes of cheap Indian plumbers remotely doing their job while not incurring the cost of living associated with the area receiving the product of work. Immigrants are usually cheap labor, but at least then they have to make enough to live in the local area. People who's jobs can almost be done as well from thousands of miles away face difficulties that more hands-on jobs need not worry about.
Uhh, I doubt it. People rarely want a videophone. They want to answer the phone fresh out of bed, or naked, or something. Also, those work conference calls where you flip off the unwitting participants are less workable...
Re:Still the anonymity problem
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Huh? That didn't make much sense.
I assume you mean DHCP-Assigned IP addresses, which well, works significantly different in IPv6. Well, for now, I acknowledge that yes, the dynamic addressing scheme by *default* uses the system mac address in a very deterministic fashion to get an IPv6 address. However, IPv6 'privacy extension' does not, and thus your IP to MAC relationship to hosts not on your network becomes as undeterminable in IPv6 as it is in IPv4. Even if the outside world did have your MAC address, they have no way of knowing *where* that MAC address is. It is still a meaningless identifier until they actual get your machine physically, at which point they've already gone well beyond the point of getting into ISP logs, or have access to the current DHCP leases and physical network segment, which isn't too much more trouble than ISP logs. Hell, you can even set your own MAC address dynamically if you want your tin foil hat to be more fully engaged.
Proxying will persist, it is more about performance and conservation of bandwidth than, say, NAT, which almost certainly goes by the wayside in IPv6 by and large. However, few ISPs have resorted to NATing customers wholesale anyway, so that isn't the case today. I have not seen an implementation, but NAT could certainly be used in IPv6 if you *really* wanted, but it still traces to the nearest routable address, which, as in IPv4 networks, is typically still you.
Ultimately, relying on the 'anonymity' of dynamic IP addresses is really ridiculous if you are really doing something requiring anonymity. IPv6 is in no way the "end of the 'net as we know it".
Even down to the 'entry' level x86 servers there are quite a few systems with significant management features built in or available as a feature. For example, the IBM e325 (an Opteron box, but still in the same class as other entry servers), has a management controller that allows remotely querying and controlling aspects of the system via the network (querying fan/voltages/power state/system events/snmp alerts on error condition, system watchdog/power control), and also supports serial console redirection and accessing the serial console (both in the OS and in POST) via the management controller.
On their other systems, you can get cards to do the same plus export the local vga display in a vnc-like fashion. I think Dell has some sort of option available too.
Of course, their blade servers are ultimate in easily manageable, vga or serial console via the network, etc...
Of course, there are also x86 boxes that have redundant/hot swap processors, memory, mirrored memory/redundant power supplies, and other niceties for the uber-high-availability-in-a-box sort of thing, but they are expensive.
Of course, your typical 'old Pentium II' doesn't have all this. But you quite frankly often don't need all that for a lot of scenarios. Even when you might, take a few, network them all together, and brush up on HA cluster configuration. One box completely dies, well, HA handles things so you maintain that reliability. For even 4 systems in a failover configuration, you still undercut the cost of the equivalent power/sparc/parisc/itanium system.
I *really* don't understand why OpenBoot is considered the end-all be-all. BIOS is ugly and hideous, but OpenBoot isn't such a compelling feature anymore in the face of other mechanisms to work around the traditional failings of BIOS. grub does most of what openboot gives, and the netbooting of a system via PXE combined with pxelinux is actually less painful in some ways than the bootp/tftp approach of OpenBoot. Argue for systems management implementations, for innate hardware failover mechanisms, for raw performance, elegance of the archtecture, for innate virtual machine capabilites (i.e. LPAR), but OpenBoot isn't anywhere close to being *THE* thing that makes a box more manageable or reliable.
At the same time a lot of cluster configurations want to have diskless nodes, because administering 1000+ systems with hard drives is painful (relatively high failure rate component). A lot more clusters are set up to run nodes mainly out of san, nbd, nfs root, or evem ramdisk for the absolutely essential things. There are all types of interesting configurations out there that are highly adapted to very specific needs.
But you are right, having to use the Blade hard drives (laptop IDE drives) is a significant performance issue for those that cannot operate via fast networks or out of ramdisk.
Good point, in my case I have 512 kbps upstream, and implement traffic shaping to really exploit it so the user-interactive stuff isn't impacted so badly. When using a mail client through IMAP, it can intelligently cache and syncing local with remote after an initial sync takes very little time.
As to instability with respect to net access and power, I'm fortunate with power and need nothing more than a 60 dollar UPS to cover that, and the net dropouts are what e-mail was architected to handle. I actually do have an arrangement with a friend with an alternate provider in case one provider cuts access for an extended period of time.
Anyway, ultimately the answer to 'why' is more than "just 'cause". Free mail providers banner ad/slip ads into mail/give out addresses, and even the ones you pay for have no compelling reason to give shell access and/or all the configuration capabilities you want... As long as my connection is generally reliable (I've had ~5 minutes total downtime over the last month) and my power reliability is nothing the UPS can't outlast, I'll run my own server where I have the control I want.
For render farms and low interconnect requirements, blades are really popular because of manageablity and density (though I am curious about the manageability of Xserves beyond OS management, i.e. service processor presence/capabilities).
As to the comment about no 'mac' blades, it is true, but if you are a big fan of power architecture, IBM has announced JS-20, a power based blade, which has the 970 (same as G5), but only at 1.6 GHz (ironically enough, IBM doesn't seem to sell anything at the clock speeds Apple gets to sell at, and they are all IBM's chips...).
The cost of blade solutions with myrinet or infiniband solutions is significant. Otherwise, most chassis' I see communicate externally through an oversubscribed ethernet switch. Ethernet is inherently sub-optimal, but oversubscribed ethernet is particularly troublesome for some of the fine-grained parallel applications (embarrasingly parrallel applications, of course, don't care, and rendering is one such application).
Add to this a lack of expansion capability (i.e. IBM blades can take one daughterboard, so there is not any possibility of, say, having a fibre channel *and* myrinet adapter in a blade server.
The only thing I'm aware of with respect to high-performance interconnect solution for blade servers available today is to get IBM blades with Myrinet daughter boards and an optical passthrough module. Ultimately, it can really reduce cabling for things like ethernet, kvm, etc etc, but those myrinet cables are still going to be a tad unwieldy (80+ wires to the cabinet, even if they are fiber cables).
I actually want to see a solution that would aggregate, say, 1X infiniband to each blade into 4 4X connectors, no oversubscription and much sturdier and fewer cables.
Yes, I love df -h being my 'mail quota'. Also, searching is nice and fast. And the ability to create a number of accounts and implement very effective spam filtering/prevention is nice too.... Total control of how I access my mail and send new mail is good too, Authenticated smtps relay, imaps access, and webmail only for when I'm desparate means a much smoother experience.
I have honestly been surprised why geeks have been so excited over gmail when they often have the resources to give themselves whatever they want. True, it is more work and worry, but the benefits are incredible and the work and worry not significant for people who do or have had to do this sort of thing for a living (and for those who haven't, what better way to develop a more sophisticated skillset).
Slashdot Mirror
To give credit where credit is due, it was indeed snopes
who provides the quite helpful notable analogy.
Funny story, but generally believed to be an urban legend.
Of note, 'no va' means doesn't move, nova is not the same as no va.
As one site pointed out, would think it strange to buy a dining set with the name 'notable' because it means 'no table'?
I hate to say it, but in this case the seller is in a tricky circumstance. Customer comes in mad about his TV being broke that was sent to him as a replacement. The TV in question has obvious physical damage that a customer is claiming to have simply not noticed for 4 months. Sounds too fishy. Now if you had immediately checked and seen it, no excuse, but there is a serious amount of reasonable doubt here.
Huh? Umm, no, clusters are heavily used for supercomputing. Take a glance at the top500 and see for yourself. With high-speed interconnects (i.e. infiniband/myrinet), it is very feasible.
But there are two things:
1) Required dependencies are discovered later and are a pain in the ass when you waste time to discover you need to backtrack
2) Optional dependencies you forget and want to make use of later.
I like gentoo, that's all I have to say about all that.
One, it's fire*fox*.
Two, I seriously doubt they are going to revert to the monolithic mozilla name for each app. Perhaps in the future mozilla will be a term to refer to a suite assembled of firefox, sunbird, and thunderbird, but you can wager the components will retain those names to maintain distinct identity, cash in on name recognition, and, frankly, most people find the name 'firefox' cooler. True example, I was hearing complaints about IE crap problems, and I recommended mozilla, and they shrugged it off as a geek-only browser, so then I said firefox, and they thought to try it, was actually swayed by things as petty as the nicely designed icon (looks like a fox humping the world if you ask me, but a nice looking fox humping a nice looking world at least). Now, he is almost exclusively using firefox.
Probably a problem discovered during 2003 testing, that, ultimately, was determined to be in XP. Happens a lot in testing that an incidental find sticks with the original summary even after finding it applies to other things.
All joking aside, 1280x1024 is the abomination of resolutions. Whoever first did that should be beaten. Why in the world did this resolution come to exist and now damn us with so many LCDs with that native resolution?
For those not aware, divide the width by height on the common resultions, all are 4/3 except 1280x1024 (5/4), with 1280x960 being the closest good-ratio resolution. The net of it being something designed for 1280x1024 looks strangely tall on a sane resolution, and something designed for sane resolutions looks vertically short on 1280x1024.
I have resolved to ban any device with 1280x1024 as the native resolution. It just irks me too much.
A *REAL* geek is satisfied with a VT or Wyse terminal.
This is not for 'enthusiasts', this is for businesses. The cost of maintaining old, failing hardware grows exponentially as both hardware problems become more frequent and availability of 'vintage' parts decreases. A businesses bottom line is hurt dramatically if they have applications that only run on the old hardware and by extension, feel a need to run that old hardware just because their core business requires the apps.
Of course, someone actually has to *write* an emulator, and if no third party steps up to do so, that would be a harder task than porting your old applications. If the antiquated system, in retrospect, turned out to be pretty mainstream and therefore modern emulators were written with the platform in mind, you are in luck. However, if a business picked an ultimate loser in the marketplace no one cared about, the chances of an emulator existing, and indeed being worthwhile to produce at all, are slim.
ARRGG... I really *HATE* the widespread use of "Inexpensive Disks' as the last part of RAID. It doesn't make sense, *NOTHING* about the strategy requires/suggests that the objects are either cheap or even traditional disks.
Redundant Array of Independent Devices just makes more sense, but I can never find which phrase was coined first, though I know I personally heard this latter version before the 'inexpensive disks' crap.
Not quite. In that case, the subject matter being parodied was directly Barbie (at least in part it was demonstrably a direct parody of Barbie). Very clearly and understandbly direct.
In this case, the song is not being parodied, it is being manipulated to parody Kerry and Bush. Since it is not a direct subject of the parody, and only used as a means to parody something else, it is quite possibly not a protected use. The expectation is that if you are going to parody, you have to use your own material to do so.
This same issue came up for a Penny Arcade comic that used Strawberry Shortcake characters to parody American McGee. In that case as in this one, the characters were not being parodied, but used *in* a parody. Though Penny Arcade backed down well before going to court on that comic, it is generally thought they would have lost. Shortly after, they did a comic directly parodying American Greetings for their trouble, and never received notification to take it down (under a claim such as 'defamation of character' or some such) so the lawyers probably acknowledged that as a direct parody and protected speech.
All that said, it *MAY* be possible to show that the song is at least partially directly parodying the orignal song. One segment that comes clear to my mind in this context is the Native American saying 'this land was my land', which does directly parody the spirit and meaning behind the song. There are other places, but if I was going to fight that in their shoes, I would think that would be a good focus point to demonstrate that it is in part a direct, protected parody.
has gone to hell.
My coworkers may realize I really don't know anything if I can't google up answers real soon now...
Nitpick, it may sound like 'pixi', but I'm 99% confident you meant 'PXE'.
A plumber in pakistan isn't installing pipes in my house in the USA, the comparison is not valid. The issue with IT is that remotely administering networks/systems is entirely within the realm of possibility. With nothing more than a skeleton crew local to keep that connection alive, a skeleton crew that can even be shared by different companies, the bulk of IT tasks can be done overseas. Plumbers don't have to worry about hordes of cheap Indian plumbers remotely doing their job while not incurring the cost of living associated with the area receiving the product of work. Immigrants are usually cheap labor, but at least then they have to make enough to live in the local area. People who's jobs can almost be done as well from thousands of miles away face difficulties that more hands-on jobs need not worry about.
Uhh, I doubt it. People rarely want a videophone. They want to answer the phone fresh out of bed, or naked, or something.
Also, those work conference calls where you flip off the unwitting participants are less workable...
Huh? That didn't make much sense.
I assume you mean DHCP-Assigned IP addresses, which well, works significantly different in IPv6. Well, for now, I acknowledge that yes, the dynamic addressing scheme by *default* uses the system mac address in a very deterministic fashion to get an IPv6 address. However, IPv6 'privacy extension' does not, and thus your IP to MAC relationship to hosts not on your network becomes as undeterminable in IPv6 as it is in IPv4. Even if the outside world did have your MAC address, they have no way of knowing *where* that MAC address is. It is still a meaningless identifier until they actual get your machine physically, at which point they've already gone well beyond the point of getting into ISP logs, or have access to the current DHCP leases and physical network segment, which isn't too much more trouble than ISP logs. Hell, you can even set your own MAC address dynamically if you want your tin foil hat to be more fully engaged.
Proxying will persist, it is more about performance and conservation of bandwidth than, say, NAT, which almost certainly goes by the wayside in IPv6 by and large. However, few ISPs have resorted to NATing customers wholesale anyway, so that isn't the case today. I have not seen an implementation, but NAT could certainly be used in IPv6 if you *really* wanted, but it still traces to the nearest routable address, which, as in IPv4 networks, is typically still you.
Ultimately, relying on the 'anonymity' of dynamic IP addresses is really ridiculous if you are really doing something requiring anonymity. IPv6 is in no way the "end of the 'net as we know it".
.... tit could use some useability...
If there is one thing in this world that doesn't need useability improvements, that would be it...
As the quote goes:
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple, after that, it's all learned."
Piat: Patch It Again Tomorrow
Sure you can.
Even down to the 'entry' level x86 servers there are quite a few systems with significant management features built in or available as a feature. For example, the IBM e325 (an Opteron box, but still in the same class as other entry servers), has a management controller that allows remotely querying and controlling aspects of the system via the network (querying fan/voltages/power state/system events/snmp alerts on error condition, system watchdog/power control), and also supports serial console redirection and accessing the serial console (both in the OS and in POST) via the management controller.
On their other systems, you can get cards to do the same plus export the local vga display in a vnc-like fashion. I think Dell has some sort of option available too.
Of course, their blade servers are ultimate in easily manageable, vga or serial console via the network, etc...
Of course, there are also x86 boxes that have redundant/hot swap processors, memory, mirrored memory/redundant power supplies, and other niceties for the uber-high-availability-in-a-box sort of thing, but they are expensive.
Of course, your typical 'old Pentium II' doesn't have all this. But you quite frankly often don't need all that for a lot of scenarios. Even when you might, take a few, network them all together, and brush up on HA cluster configuration. One box completely dies, well, HA handles things so you maintain that reliability. For even 4 systems in a failover configuration, you still undercut the cost of the equivalent power/sparc/parisc/itanium system.
I *really* don't understand why OpenBoot is considered the end-all be-all. BIOS is ugly and hideous, but OpenBoot isn't such a compelling feature anymore in the face of other mechanisms to work around the traditional failings of BIOS. grub does most of what openboot gives, and the netbooting of a system via PXE combined with pxelinux is actually less painful in some ways than the bootp/tftp approach of OpenBoot. Argue for systems management implementations, for innate hardware failover mechanisms, for raw performance, elegance of the archtecture, for innate virtual machine capabilites (i.e. LPAR), but OpenBoot isn't anywhere close to being *THE* thing that makes a box more manageable or reliable.
I ment html mail composing ofcourse. and I almost forgot the virus and spam wizards
Wizards to help create spam and virii easily?
Kmail for sKript Kiddies?
At the same time a lot of cluster configurations want to have diskless nodes, because administering 1000+ systems with hard drives is painful (relatively high failure rate component). A lot more clusters are set up to run nodes mainly out of san, nbd, nfs root, or evem ramdisk for the absolutely essential things. There are all types of interesting configurations out there that are highly adapted to very specific needs.
But you are right, having to use the Blade hard drives (laptop IDE drives) is a significant performance issue for those that cannot operate via fast networks or out of ramdisk.
Good point, in my case I have 512 kbps upstream, and implement traffic shaping to really exploit it so the user-interactive stuff isn't impacted so badly. When using a mail client through IMAP, it can intelligently cache and syncing local with remote after an initial sync takes very little time.
As to instability with respect to net access and power, I'm fortunate with power and need nothing more than a 60 dollar UPS to cover that, and the net dropouts are what e-mail was architected to handle. I actually do have an arrangement with a friend with an alternate provider in case one provider cuts access for an extended period of time.
Anyway, ultimately the answer to 'why' is more than "just 'cause". Free mail providers banner ad/slip ads into mail/give out addresses, and even the ones you pay for have no compelling reason to give shell access and/or all the configuration capabilities you want... As long as my connection is generally reliable (I've had ~5 minutes total downtime over the last month) and my power reliability is nothing the UPS can't outlast, I'll run my own server where I have the control I want.
For render farms and low interconnect requirements, blades are really popular because of manageablity and density (though I am curious about the manageability of Xserves beyond OS management, i.e. service processor presence/capabilities).
As to the comment about no 'mac' blades, it is true, but if you are a big fan of power architecture, IBM has announced JS-20, a power based blade, which has the 970 (same as G5), but only at 1.6 GHz (ironically enough, IBM doesn't seem to sell anything at the clock speeds Apple gets to sell at, and they are all IBM's chips...).
The cost of blade solutions with myrinet or infiniband solutions is significant. Otherwise, most chassis' I see communicate externally through an oversubscribed ethernet switch. Ethernet is inherently sub-optimal, but oversubscribed ethernet is particularly troublesome for some of the fine-grained parallel applications (embarrasingly parrallel applications, of course, don't care, and rendering is one such application).
Add to this a lack of expansion capability (i.e. IBM blades can take one daughterboard, so there is not any possibility of, say, having a fibre channel *and* myrinet adapter in a blade server.
The only thing I'm aware of with respect to high-performance interconnect solution for blade servers available today is to get IBM blades with Myrinet daughter boards and an optical passthrough module. Ultimately, it can really reduce cabling for things like ethernet, kvm, etc etc, but those myrinet cables are still going to be a tad unwieldy (80+ wires to the cabinet, even if they are fiber cables).
I actually want to see a solution that would aggregate, say, 1X infiniband to each blade into 4 4X connectors, no oversubscription and much sturdier and fewer cables.
Yes, I love df -h being my 'mail quota'. Also, searching is nice and fast. And the ability to create a number of accounts and implement very effective spam filtering/prevention is nice too.... Total control of how I access my mail and send new mail is good too, Authenticated smtps relay, imaps access, and webmail only for when I'm desparate means a much smoother experience.
I have honestly been surprised why geeks have been so excited over gmail when they often have the resources to give themselves whatever they want. True, it is more work and worry, but the benefits are incredible and the work and worry not significant for people who do or have had to do this sort of thing for a living (and for those who haven't, what better way to develop a more sophisticated skillset).