They only want information about the IT skills of their own members. How else would they process ONLY 28,000 responses at 2 minutes each? This doesn't even seem to apply to all Infragard members, only:
"Public and private professionals self-identified as having information technology expertise."
This would also be why it's called: "InfraGard Knowledge/Skills/ Abilities Profile"
IT seems kindof obvious that they might want to know what the skills of their own members are if they need assistance on something. Not like the FBI knows anything about technology.
Perhaps they're looking for resources for the next time they have an IT issue/project they need to not fuck up. According to their website, you need a background check to join. Seems like a good way to build a database of IT professionals that you don't need to do background checks on after the fact.
I suppose if it's pushing data from/dev/null, but their claiming it can do it with stateful packet inspection and protocol analysis. I wonder what kind of latency it adds. Either way, the odds it can accept data, analyze it and push it back out at anywhere near 100mbps is close to 0;
I keep wondering how they put such a fast processor on a usb stick and then squirt bidirectional 100Mbps over the USB port. Sounds a lot like my former boss trying to convince me that our building would give us 100Mbps internet for only $50/month. I dislike misleading articles and I dislike misleading product descriptions even more.
It seems much more likely that there's an app on the USB stick tht is run by the windows machine making the USB stick just a different delivery mechanism than a CD/DVD. Probably way cheaper to produce, update and ship.
I've run into this type of issue several times. The issue is'nt so much moving the plug, it's that the MB maintains power for up to a couple of minutes after the power is lost. If the Power glitched, the MB may be in a non-useable state. The way I solve the problem is this: 1) Unplug the Power supply. 2) Hold down the power button (on the front) for 10 seconds. 3) plug in the power supply 4) Turn on the computer.
I solve this issue with most of my systems by connectiong them to a UPS. Some crash on their own so often that they're not worth a UPS.
Remarkably, that's not how the Oracle reps explained it to me. I went around with then for quite some time trying to figure out a way to get that to happen properly and they kept telling me that there was not a way to protect against a SAN device failure.
As for availability on mysql, The switch limitation is an OS issue. I choose to run an OS that can't handle multiple interfaces per subnet, though that issue has been fixed in the latest version. As for adding storage space, I believe that fix is scheduled for the next version of mysql. I won't get into support contract price differences.
Your database size is NOT limited to the amount of RAM a single node can support unless you're only running 2 nodes. It's possible that your tables size may be limited, but I don't believe that that is the case. No, the cluster storage system does not support all the INNO DB features, but INNODB doesn't support all of the MyISAM features. Does that make MyISAM better?
Name a DB from a 'big guy' that doesn't require a shared resource. Oracle? Nope. RAC requires a shared storage solution. Lose your single storage device device and you lose access to your db. MS-SQL? Don't make me laugh. SAP? No. Postgres? No. Firebird? No. Who's left? MySQL is the ONLY available 'shared nothing' (tm) solution available.
Yes, the RAM only tables suck for large DBs. On the other hand, they're REALLY fast and they can be easily scaled up on commodity hardware rather than requiring faster and bigger servers and storage. I'm in medium shop that only requires a few gigs of table space. I'm n+2 on webservers/sql servers and data storage nodes for under $15k. If I wanted to use Redhat on amd64 with gobs of ram/machine, I could probably be n+2 to 64G for under $50k. The only time I will EVER have to take my cluster down is to add more storage space or to replace my switch. That will result in about 10 minutes of downtime. Based on growth, I won't have to do that for another 18 months. If I wanted to spend another $10k, I could avoid having to take down the system in the event of switch failure. I've never had a carrier grade switch failure on any of my networks, so I'm feeling pretty good about availability.
Yes it's expensive to get up into the terabyte range with ram based tables, but there's also no other way to do it without either spending ridiculous amounts of money or being dependent on a single piece of hardware.
While MySQL supports master/slave replication, MySQL Cluster specifically avoids that entire model. It's an entirely synchronous database storage engine. If you want master/slave, use postgres. If you want high availability and can handle the lack of a small number of features, MySQL Cluster is the way to go. The only real downside to the architecture required for CLuster is that all of the data is stored in RAM based tables. transactions are logged to disk every (configurable) time interval. If you're going to try for HA, you might want to RTFM on the available options before you settle on one.
While I was at Quakecon (with it's roughly 10 vendors) I saw new games with amazing sounds and at least two vendors who were hyping their audio technology. They had 5.1 headphones and some incredible THX speakers from Creative. When playing Doom3 with a good audio system, I had an audio experience unlike that of any other game i've ever played. Admittedly, there were not many vendors, but saying that audio is a forgotten component just doesn't reflect the reality of Quakecon. Or are you just trying to get readers? Perhaps you've just noticed that reflex and knowing the maps better than your opponent are more important that hearing your bullets hit him?
Well, according to this, they didn't start BUILDING RC2 until 2003/12/21. Two months ago, you probably would have built some seriously unstable code. This isn't -STABLE, it's -CURRENT. And if you'd done a upgrade from 4.x to 5.x without an intervening format, you'd have been in for some fun as well. If you'll look at the release notes, you'll also see that statfs(2) got a tweak that probably caused all sorts of problems for you if you weren't paying attention to the freeber-current list. Perhaps next time, you'll have better luck with something that's not in the MIDDLE of a development cycle?
I knew someone who worked for a company years ago (maybe he still does) whee the bosses were similarly stupid. He was THE unix guy at a company involved with transoceanic shipping. His bosses were so paranoid that he might do something maliciously (servers on the ships too) that they made him WRITE CODE that would track what he did in the event he decided to do something unauthorized. All kinds of shades of stupid.
The flip side of this is that most of the major IT disasters I've seen have been caused by idiot1 getting hired by idiot2 to do a job that neither idiot1 nor idiot2 knew the first thing about.
Houston uses their tollway RFID tags to do this(almost). It's in use here to map speed between points around Houston. I expect that it's only a matter of time before someone thinks to use this for writing tickets. The description of how it works for Houston is here and here.
I had someone tell me once about a problem in some of their old ATMs in development where the transaction data to/from the ATM was encrypted, but the control data wasn't so you could trivially tell the ATM that all of its cash slots contained $1 bills. Withdraw $20 from a machine that held only $20s and viola, $400.
My personal experience was with a financial institution I was helping to move into a new facility. Diebold installed cameras, digital video recorders, video switchers and everything, but they only put UPSs on the recorders and switchers. the cameras were plugged into a power supply that was connected directly to a wall outlet. Had I not reported the idiocy of the installation, a subsequent power failure would have immediately resulted in a significant amount of very high quality snow being recorded on the digital video recorders.
ok, so the voters are going to offload the code installed on the voting machines and assume that they're not only being given the code that's actually running, but that every machine is the same?
Yeah, That'll work. I can just see the election judge stopping everyone from voting because some guy with a laptop wants to personally verify each voting machine. If not, then who does the verification? Who watches the watchers? It's not Diebold or M$. And it's certainly not the government.
No, my argument was stupid and about something totally invalidated by the article. I wasn't awake yet.
But now that you mention it... If the machines are opensource, aren't the people loading the code into the machines ALSO the ones who've been loading uncertified code into the machines? How do the voters know that the source code they've seen is what's in the machine?
It's not too late. Now the machines can fudge the ballots that they print to prove that the ballots they fudged electronically are valid. What a great idea.
Saying it's too late suggests that this might actually make a positive difference. I see it as a large step back. Now the candidate can say 'See? The paper ballots PROVE that I got all the votes and the other candidates didnt get any! The other candidates must have voted for me too. The paper receipts PROVE it.'
My belief is that they are sent for possibly two reasons.
1) Verify that the email address is deliverable. It makes no sense to keep a bad email address in your database of spam targets.
2) Seed statistical spam filters with bogus data.
I've been really happy with bogofilter on my IMAP server. Once I got the bus worked out of my scripts, it's running about 98% accuracy with zero good emails getting filtered as spam.
Sorry, I don't think it will work. 90% of my spams are either gibberish or are otherwise not selling anything. Passages from shakespeare and the like or blank emails are pretty common for me these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone pointed out to the distributor precisely who the target audience for the publication is?
Next week on pastebin: All of their dirty laundry.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/04/02/14/0123206/The-Galaxys-Largest-Diamond
It's not an ISP either AFAIK. They claim to lease servers from ThePlanet.
Forgot to log in. :/
They only want information about the IT skills of their own members. How else would they process ONLY 28,000 responses at 2 minutes each? This doesn't even seem to apply to all Infragard members, only:
"Public and private professionals
self-identified as having information technology expertise."
This would also be why it's called:
"InfraGard Knowledge/Skills/
Abilities Profile"
IT seems kindof obvious that they might want to know what the skills of their own members are if they need assistance on something. Not like the FBI knows anything about technology.
Perhaps they're looking for resources for the next time they have an IT issue/project they need to not fuck up. According to their website, you need a background check to join. Seems like a good way to build a database of IT professionals that you don't need to do background checks on after the fact.
I suppose if it's pushing data from /dev/null, but their claiming it can do it with stateful packet inspection and protocol analysis. I wonder what kind of latency it adds. Either way, the odds it can accept data, analyze it and push it back out at anywhere near 100mbps is close to 0;
I keep wondering how they put such a fast processor on a usb stick and then squirt bidirectional 100Mbps over the USB port. Sounds a lot like my former boss trying to convince me that our building would give us 100Mbps internet for only $50/month. I dislike misleading articles and I dislike misleading product descriptions even more.
It seems much more likely that there's an app on the USB stick tht is run by the windows machine making the USB stick just a different delivery mechanism than a CD/DVD. Probably way cheaper to produce, update and ship.
I've run into this type of issue several times. The issue is'nt so much moving the plug, it's that the MB maintains power for up to a couple of minutes after the power is lost. If the Power glitched, the MB may be in a non-useable state. The way I solve the problem is this:
1) Unplug the Power supply.
2) Hold down the power button (on the front) for 10 seconds.
3) plug in the power supply
4) Turn on the computer.
I solve this issue with most of my systems by connectiong them to a UPS. Some crash on their own so often that they're not worth a UPS.
Remarkably, that's not how the Oracle reps explained it to me. I went around with then for quite some time trying to figure out a way to get that to happen properly and they kept telling me that there was not a way to protect against a SAN device failure.
As for availability on mysql, The switch limitation is an OS issue. I choose to run an OS that can't handle multiple interfaces per subnet, though that issue has been fixed in the latest version. As for adding storage space, I believe that fix is scheduled for the next version of mysql. I won't get into support contract price differences.
Your database size is NOT limited to the amount of RAM a single node can support unless you're only running 2 nodes. It's possible that your tables size may be limited, but I don't believe that that is the case. No, the cluster storage system does not support all the INNO DB features, but INNODB doesn't support all of the MyISAM features. Does that make MyISAM better?
Name a DB from a 'big guy' that doesn't require a shared resource. Oracle? Nope. RAC requires a shared storage solution. Lose your single storage device device and you lose access to your db. MS-SQL? Don't make me laugh. SAP? No. Postgres? No. Firebird? No. Who's left? MySQL is the ONLY available 'shared nothing' (tm) solution available.
Yes, the RAM only tables suck for large DBs. On the other hand, they're REALLY fast and they can be easily scaled up on commodity hardware rather than requiring faster and bigger servers and storage. I'm in medium shop that only requires a few gigs of table space. I'm n+2 on webservers/sql servers and data storage nodes for under $15k. If I wanted to use Redhat on amd64 with gobs of ram/machine, I could probably be n+2 to 64G for under $50k. The only time I will EVER have to take my cluster down is to add more storage space or to replace my switch. That will result in about 10 minutes of downtime. Based on growth, I won't have to do that for another 18 months. If I wanted to spend another $10k, I could avoid having to take down the system in the event of switch failure. I've never had a carrier grade switch failure on any of my networks, so I'm feeling pretty good about availability.
Yes it's expensive to get up into the terabyte range with ram based tables, but there's also no other way to do it without either spending ridiculous amounts of money or being dependent on a single piece of hardware.
While MySQL supports master/slave replication, MySQL Cluster specifically avoids that entire model. It's an entirely synchronous database storage engine. If you want master/slave, use postgres. If you want high availability and can handle the lack of a small number of features, MySQL Cluster is the way to go. The only real downside to the architecture required for CLuster is that all of the data is stored in RAM based tables. transactions are logged to disk every (configurable) time interval. If you're going to try for HA, you might want to RTFM on the available options before you settle on one.
Isn't the 8th a Tuesday?
While I was at Quakecon (with it's roughly 10 vendors) I saw new games with amazing sounds and at least two vendors who were hyping their audio technology. They had 5.1 headphones and some incredible THX speakers from Creative. When playing Doom3 with a good audio system, I had an audio experience unlike that of any other game i've ever played.
Admittedly, there were not many vendors, but saying that audio is a forgotten component just doesn't reflect the reality of Quakecon. Or are you just trying to get readers?
Perhaps you've just noticed that reflex and knowing the maps better than your opponent are more important that hearing your bullets hit him?
First we get 'xxx product released'. Then we get 'xxx product beta released'. Now we're getting 'xxx company plans to release'??
Can I just be the first to say DUH.
Well, according to this, they didn't start BUILDING RC2 until 2003/12/21. Two months ago, you probably would have built some seriously unstable code. This isn't -STABLE, it's -CURRENT. And if you'd done a upgrade from 4.x to 5.x without an intervening format, you'd have been in for some fun as well. If you'll look at the release notes, you'll also see that statfs(2) got a tweak that probably caused all sorts of problems for you if you weren't paying attention to the freeber-current list. Perhaps next time, you'll have better luck with something that's not in the MIDDLE of a development cycle?
I knew someone who worked for a company years ago (maybe he still does) whee the bosses were similarly stupid. He was THE unix guy at a company involved with transoceanic shipping. His bosses were so paranoid that he might do something maliciously (servers on the ships too) that they made him WRITE CODE that would track what he did in the event he decided to do something unauthorized. All kinds of shades of stupid.
The flip side of this is that most of the major IT disasters I've seen have been caused by idiot1 getting hired by idiot2 to do a job that neither idiot1 nor idiot2 knew the first thing about.
Houston uses their tollway RFID tags to do this(almost). It's in use here to map speed between points around Houston. I expect that it's only a matter of time before someone thinks to use this for writing tickets. The description of how it works for Houston is here and here.
I had someone tell me once about a problem in some of their old ATMs in development where the transaction data to/from the ATM was encrypted, but the control data wasn't so you could trivially tell the ATM that all of its cash slots contained $1 bills. Withdraw $20 from a machine that held only $20s and viola, $400.
My personal experience was with a financial institution I was helping to move into a new facility. Diebold installed cameras, digital video recorders, video switchers and everything, but they only put UPSs on the recorders and switchers. the cameras were plugged into a power supply that was connected directly to a wall outlet. Had I not reported the idiocy of the installation, a subsequent power failure would have immediately resulted in a significant amount of very high quality snow being recorded on the digital video recorders.
ok, so the voters are going to offload the code installed on the voting machines and assume that they're not only being given the code that's actually running, but that every machine is the same?
Yeah, That'll work. I can just see the election judge stopping everyone from voting because some guy with a laptop wants to personally verify each voting machine. If not, then who does the verification? Who watches the watchers? It's not Diebold or M$. And it's certainly not the government.
No, my argument was stupid and about something totally invalidated by the article. I wasn't awake yet.
But now that you mention it... If the machines are opensource, aren't the people loading the code into the machines ALSO the ones who've been loading uncertified code into the machines? How do the voters know that the source code they've seen is what's in the machine?
ok, scratch that. I need to remember not to post before I wake up.
It's not too late. Now the machines can fudge the ballots that they print to prove that the ballots they fudged electronically are valid. What a great idea.
Saying it's too late suggests that this might actually make a positive difference. I see it as a large step back. Now the candidate can say 'See? The paper ballots PROVE that I got all the votes and the other candidates didnt get any! The other candidates must have voted for me too. The paper receipts PROVE it.'
I didn't say it would work, I said that's why they might be doing it. :)
My belief is that they are sent for possibly two reasons.
1) Verify that the email address is deliverable. It makes no sense to keep a bad email address in your database of spam targets.
2) Seed statistical spam filters with bogus data.
I've been really happy with bogofilter on my IMAP server. Once I got the bus worked out of my scripts, it's running about 98% accuracy with zero good emails getting filtered as spam.
Sorry, I don't think it will work. 90% of my spams are either gibberish or are otherwise not selling anything. Passages from shakespeare and the like or blank emails are pretty common for me these days.