More often than not, the evil a company perpetrates against employees and customers is directly relational to the number of business school graduates who hold the reigns of power. If they're Californians by schooling, that's an exponential curve.
At the last job I quit (an MSP), I gave my boss a bound book with all passwords. It was a fire list: these are the things you need to change when I leave to adhere to best security practices. I had him sign for receipt. I also gave the same book to the client who was endeared to me and was not fond of how I'd been treated by my boss.:D Rumor has it they spent roughly two months doing basic things like trying to figure out how to get access to systems to change the root and/or service passwords...
For desktop stuff, I have a solution to that: I have a small plywood shelf unit (think: post office mailbox sized shelves/boxes). Devices sit inside the box. Cables are threaded in through the back of the box, and excess length gets cinch tied into the box with the adapter plug. Right now I've got a 6x5 cubby cube, about 1.5'x2' in size. The power for the unit is on a surge protector bar, which is screwed into the wall above it. Excess cord (if there is any) dangles behind the desk in a natural loop. (I've also used cinch ties to make sure that power bricks hanging this way do not lose the power cord from their rear.)
As for networking: Get 5 different cable colors and then each bundle needs to have no more than 5 cables. You then take those bundles of 5, which are small enough and convenient enough to neatly bundle or wrap in and of themselves, and bundle them together
Typically, I've found, you need 1 to 3 bundles per rack. Any extra runs can just hide or dangle free; it's still less mess. (If you're doing central switching instead of the more preferable top of rack switching, it's a bit of a pain in the ass. ) These bundles then get labeled - with a simple number. I can quickly figure out where something is plugged in by looking for that bundle on the switch and the appropriate color.
I prefer to do my bundling exclusively with Velcro but quick ties work pretty well at the 'switch side' of the cable to keep everything tight and neat, too.
(Or do bundles of 8 or something like that with 8 colors, whatever. 5 works out pretty well with pre-existing cables sometimes, too, though - red, blue, green, grey, black).
You may have missed where they were ripping out DNS subsystem functionality (interoperability with BIND and a couple other options, IIRC) and replacing it wholesale with their own samba4 DNS implementation. I think they did that during later betas, but I'm not sure.
OK, so if I want to have centralized login/credential management for my Windows workstations/laptops but don't want to let Windows near the server room, where do I start?
"Active Directory" or "Samba 4" are really the only two answers I'm aware of, and currently, I don't like either.
I have a samba box with Win7 auth via AD working fine, and serving 118MB/s over gig-e.
Um, no, you don't. You're completely full of shit. You may be sending 118 MB/s over the wire, but you're getting about 15-20% less than that, at best, due to CIFS/SMB overhead.
You do realize that 'administering' FreeNAS isn't the same as administering Samba, right? Just checking.
(I have found that the likelihood of issues with file sharing/whatever with Samba is fairly highly related to how well the 'integration' was handled beforehand by the distribution/packager, as is the case in FreeNAS. They polished that aspect very nicely.)
You realize that the guide you link is not only horribly out of date (over a year IIRC since alpha11 came out) and won't work with any of the current alpha (yeah, ALPHA) releases, but that Samba 4 has it's own dNS server now, basically requiring it operate autonomously from existing infrastructure?
Yes, building/installing and then provisioning Samba 4 takes all of about 5 minutes. Now integrate it with something which was in existence before you decide to stroke your balls with Samba 4... good luck, let me know how it goes.
Please consider a couple things: of all the Linux/Unix daemons I've had to administer, Samba is by far the most cumbersome and finicky, requiring the most attention regardless of distribution.
* It's usually not possible to run Debian's Samba(3) packages without pulling the backports. They won't work with anything remotely recent, more than likely. * I've had several situations where upgrades on 'stable' releases of Linux have resulted in Samba bugs manifesting (twice resulting in an unplanned outage, personally). Regressions? Who knows. They're frequent enough that I can think of 3-4 that've occurred in the last couple years. * This may be more the fault of ports, but I've had the samba FreeBSD ports distribution break configuration compatibility multiple times in just the past two years (using AD domain based authentication). My understanding is that Ports is fairly 'consistent' with upstream and this is suggestive of release problems upstream.
Also, samba is not 'consistently reliable'. Is it consistently stable? Very much so. However, I'd rather read slapd logs than samba logs; they're a fucking pit of vipers, and you'll end up learning more about SMB, CIFS, winbind, etc. protocols trying to figure out what's going on than your average high-quality Windows admin (you know, the ones with the high end certs) could even begin to understand. The unfortunate fact is, reading the logs for samba has always been fairly necessary, with a relatively high log verbosity; this doesn't bode well for reliability.;) And this doesn't even delve into the problems encountered due to MS-pushed patching or eg. talking with poorly behaving Macs running old versions of Samba: truth be told, it doesn't seem to interoperate with itself all that well.
As a basic file and print service it does quite well, particularly on the CUPS print interchange role. But IMO it hasn't been a 'superior' file serving platform to Windows since 2008 came out. It's functionality is "marginal" unless you've got people willing and able to set up LDAP and backend it against that, or want to use Windows domain credentialing. (Even then, the ACLs can get a bit fubar.)
Sorry, what? Have you run Samba in a business environment? I have, and I can completely understand the sentiments here: there's a lot of little stuff that goes amiss or requires seemingly excessive management.
There are a LOT of "small glitches" while using Samba 3 in any not-just-Linux environment. It has nothing to do with 'poor administration'. Over the years, I have had problems with Windows - 98, XP, 2k, 2k3,Vista, and now W7 - operating properly against a Samba host. This isn't a matter of 'improperly administered' so much as it's a "Microsoft released a patch which broke things which worked previously" problem, and it seems to be getting worse as time goes on.
To add insult to injury, Samba 3 development has basically been in 'maintenance' mode for years, with Samba 4 getting seemingly preferential treatment. There have been very few new features of functionality added to Samba 3 aside from the odd "needed to keep things working well" patch or a backport from Samba 4 by an intrepid sysadmin (or so it seems). Really, what used to seem like a very nice and mature project now feels like something on life support, with half the features present having been backported from the development branch, often without a full implementation, inconsistencies, and no/poor documentation.
As for Samba 4, (which neither you nor my post's GP seem to realize we're talking about here): it's an entirely different beast than Samba 3. The only significant thing it appears to share in common with Samba 3 is the smb.conf format and actual file/print services (which is a fairly recent change). It is still in HEAVY development. What they started out to implement was really quite awesome and interesting: Active Directory based on open source tools currently in existence. At one point, they were using BIND for DNS integration and Heimdal for the directory. Their team members made many valiant attempts and efforts in providing patches to these supporting projects.
However...
Both those things are now internal to Samba 4. That's right: the directory itself as well as a DNS server are components to Samba 4. IMO, this is the biggest mistake they've made, and waiting would've been worth it if they could've gotten BIND to work (they couldn't, due to design differences between it and Windows AD/DNS frequency, chain of authority, etc. IIRC - not without making a mess).
Integration of their own directory (based on a heimdal fork, IIRC) makes sense. But not DNS, at least as its implemented now. The DNS server is not BIND compatible and will not take a zone transfer, and doesn't even do reverse records yet (not properly, at least).
THAT SAID, Samba 4 is still not hitting a 1.0 release. Who knows if 1.0 will mean 'beta, we're polishing' or 'production ready' - but I will bet you anything that it will be lacking documentation on how the tools work and have quite a few bugs.:(
I've been a follower of Samba 4 since I was in college, and that was close to a decade ago. I don't think there's much hope of it ever being production ready, not anymore. They tried to do too much, and as a result, Samba 4 won't be all that usable in an existing Samba 3 network where DNS is also used - it just won't be possible without making a huge mess of things due to a pre-existing DNS system which won't be able to be fully compatible.
Samba 4 works "OK" at home, but only if you've got very limited needs and you're starting from scratch. It's not nearly as flexible as Samba 3 (eg. different authentication backends, for instance) and from my point of view will not be 'production ready' for many years at its current pace.
Why does this make any sense at all? Amazon doesn't do the shipping, they just put it on a truck (or have the carrier pick it up, I'm not sure how that works). But the point is, they don't run the trucks, so they shouldn't be charging tax on shipping, just handling. There's really no reason, other than increasing profits illicitly or trying to play nice with the state, that they'd charge tax on both. They could figure out the difference if they really wanted to, they know what it costs to ship and to process things probably down to the tenth of a cent per package (on average).
(I'm sorry, but if these bastards can give me recommendations on dating advice and dealing with divorce books very shortly after my wife changed her facebook status, they can get these little details right.)
Every state requires that you pay sales tax on every out of state purchase. It does not matter if you order it over the phone, mail order, internet, or even drive across the border to buy something in person. Every state has a tax form to claim the amount of taxes owed that should be filed with your annual tax return.
No they don't. Oregon, Montana, Alaska, New Hampshire, and Delaware don't have sales tax. You know, a tenth of the country's states.
It may also be a surprise to you that some of the states don't double dip on income tax, either: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, Wyoming
(If you're observant and knowledge inclined, you may note a pattern/trend amongst these states which is not present in places like NY or CA, where sales and income taxes are high but the states are still completely strapped.)
I have to ask, where did these 15cm of sea level come from? That's not explicitly from global warming, not necessarily.
* different precipitation patterns may have resulted in less precipitation falling on the poles (ie climate change). Weather patterns are constantly changing. * it's well known that pole ice pack has actually increased in depth over the last several years. * the magnetic north pole has been rapidly shifting towards siberia over the past 50 years (which might impact weather, since the earth is essentially a giant magnet) * all the while, the world's glaciers are still melting at roughly the same rate they have for the last millennia * the past 50 years have seen copious amounts of water pumped from aquifers for use in industrial processes and general human consumption.
Here's a hint: when your model data keeps changing and taking drastically different perspectives on the same information, all with constantly disproven hypothesis, maybe the premise you reached before studying things is wrong, and you're missing something important. There are different hypothesises which explain the "higher sea level" scenario, but climatologists are unwilling to entertain them for purely dogmatic reasons, dismissing them purely out of hand.
Just because this (mild) storm is hitting a densely populated industrial shoreline area not accustomed to hurricanes doesn't change the fact that a) people are over-reacting and b) the high population density of the area doesn't make the storm any worse than it was.
The places without power or fuel for their generators? They're getting it shipped in. There is power and plenty of fuel (gas/diesel) two hours from where the worst hit are. You know, a two hour commute is not unheard of or even all that uncommon in the area. These people were just unprepared, expecting the government to come and save them.
I'm sorry, but as someone who is accustomed to power outages occurring for weeks at a time, sometimes - and during the dead of winter - I really have no sympathy for them. This shit happens all the time. People were crying "racism" when the black people of New Orleans were looting and killing each other, and people brought attention to it. Well it wasn't racism, it was the same sentiment which makes me now say these mickish wops (I'm half irish, half italian) were fucking idiots and didn't prepare for what was before them. They had weeks of forewarning and they're goddamn lucky it wasn't as bad as everyone was saying it was going to be.
It's government we're talking about here, quite obviously. "Let's spend a lot more than we need to spend on something which won't be half as resilient as the common, industry accepted approach".
There's a reason why even nuclear power facilities use diesel generators. They're a good fall-back.
It confounds me why people would put a high-area-requirement industrial facility in one of the most expensive locations in the world (same goes for San Francisco). Do you not see the value of moving it off the 3rd floor of an elaborate building in the Financial district? I know of many companies that do this and just have to 'wtf' when they obviously have the $$$ to locate it somewhere more sensible.
Sure, cost per server difference might be relatively negligible, but there are costs there which you wouldn't have elsewhere - travel, accessibility, facility cost and accessibility cost can all collude against you.
Hell, even the Facebook place up in the arctic is, in some ways, more accessible than somewhere like this: you're not going to have flooding, rioting, earthquakes, rioting, etc. from preventing your engineers/technicians from getting in. They'll already be there, and you've got enough actual land to stow 50k gallons of reserve fuel. In the grander scheme of things there are many other options that make more sense for a datacenter; the small-minded, culturally-centric types who run these things just aren't really able to see the obvious.:)
I see where you got your numbers from, but my experience says otherwise. Most common non-residential underground tanks will last 30+ years without a problem (though they need to be regularly inspected and maintained, of course). Unlike in a residential heating oil setting, underground tanks (incl. fill stations but mainly gas stations) get regularly (think: weekly) inspected for water. This is also true for smaller operations: in diesel specifically, water content will encourage bacteria growth and make the fuel all but useless in a couple of weeks, destroying tens of thousands of reserve energy.
Not sure where you get the "infrastructure is 100 years old" idea. This isn't a movie with Italian gangsters lurking in the shadows, smoking cigars. Even though there's certainly infrastructure that old within the city, we're not talking about gas or electric mains. If we're talking about government in NYC, they regularly dispose of and replace perfectly good materials because they're simply old (we got close to 10k worth of terracotta roofing tile for a couple hundred dollars at auction). If we're talking about business, they're the richest businesses in the world and there is constant change going on with the buildings which hold their facilities. Above ground or below, it doesn't matter - they've got several of the highest quality generators with new tanks available to them.
* The EPA requires all above ground storage containers to have a secondary containment tank; my recollection is that it has to be 2/3 the total capacity of the actual tanks, though it may be 1.5 to account for eg. rainwater accumulation. This is probably why they don't put tanks with gensets on the roof. * A good quality generator measures efficiency in hours per generator (depending on kwh rating and load, of course). We're not talking about a high pressure flow rate, we're talking about the passive volumetric pressure from the bottom of the tank being able to feed a motor many stories above without issue (assuming its a sizable tank). * It's much easier to clean up spilled fuel at ground level (or above it, as the case may be ) than it is to clean up spilled fuel from an underground spill (ie, you really can't, especially when there's high "groundwater" levels as the case is here).
Try again. This is just a case of stupid gov't regulations contradicting other stupid gov't regulations, with one taking local precedence due to the local Fire Marshall enforcing more rigorously than the EPA.:)
I'm not sure how the argument that Apple's phones are somehow overpriced holds much water when they are very similar in price to Android handsets of similar quality like the Galaxy line.
Is this a serious statement? I'm having a hard time telling if it's sarcasm.
Yes, they have a similar price point.
No, they are not similar devices. Software functionality aside, the iPhone 5 is already getting a reputation of being of poor build quality. (Even amongst people who like iPhones 'because they just work', it's argued that the 4 is still better than the 5). If you include software build quality, the iPhone 5 doesn't even fully/properly support its own screen resolution. I will note that this is something that Android devices were able to handle suitably by Android 2.2, and did splendidly by 2.3.
The iPhones do not even approach the "Galaxy" line (presumably you mean Nexus devices). Not even the Nexus 4, made by LG.
If I have a nice new Maserati, and you want to drive it, you should offer to let me drive your custom off-road bog truck.
What Apple is doing is basically saying, "Let us drive your Maserati for a couple hours and we'll leave some change in the seat, and you can use the natural stream behind our house to fish for $10 a day."
It entirely depends on the vehicle, how fast the water is moving, soil type, and how long the roadway has been flooded (flooding and cross currents can destroy the road bedding before the road surface, which is dangerous, as it can result in the road actually 'falling' while you drive on it).
When I was 16, I was driving to state karate qualifications 2 hours away. It was in Spring, after a recent heavy rain. I'd been driving for an hour and a half when I came across a flooded road - about 100 yards worth. I was in an early 1990s Plymouth Voyager (Dodge Caravan). I took my shoes off, hiked up my pants, and walked across - it came up just about a foot, and there wasn't much of a current at all. So I crossed, slowly.
As long as your exhaust and air intake aren't impeded and the undercarriage doesn't (significantly) touch the water, you'll be fine. (It's funny watching lowered cars drive through a dip in the road and lose contact with said road during rainy season...)
Would I have been sound/sane to do so in a sedan or something else lower slung? No, it'd have been a fool's errand.
Now I've got a 4wd full size Blazer, with over 16" of under carriage clearance and a hood-level snorkel and top ported exhaust. If I wanted to (I don't) I could (hyperbolically) ford rivers in the thing.
That said... most people should probably just never drive, for lack of proper judgement.;)
You know, it used to be that a fully submerged vehicle would be fully servicable again after a little TLC - pressure wash the inside and detail it, check or redo major electrical connections, and replace the radio - good to go. Modern vehicles have so many different failure modes compared to functionally comparable vehicles from 15-25 years ago, it's not even funny.
Hell, even a minor fender bender will functionally total most modern vehicles. Something which something from even 10-15 years ago could take and not be damaged outside cosmetics (functions 100%) will put something in the scrap heap. This is, in my observation, significantly more true for hybrids and EVs, some of which have the batteries IN the body (what were they thinking?!).
Both Plasma Active and to some degree, Android are modal. It's the same user interface with different contextual modes for input. Plasma does this much better from what I've seen.
Doing it exclusively poorly (such as in W8) is much more of a Microsoft innovation than it's endemic to the concept.
"See that orb, hanging out there in space like a goddamn motherfuckin' testicle? You think it's a moon. It looks like a fucking moon. But motherfucker, it's no more a moon than it is a giant gonad hanging out there for all to see. It's a space station, swarming with the seed of Imperial fucking spacecraft!"
Tarantino is nothing if not overly bombastic and masturbatory with his dialog.
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Absolutely right. Michigan did end up going to Obama just the other day, after all.
More often than not, the evil a company perpetrates against employees and customers is directly relational to the number of business school graduates who hold the reigns of power. If they're Californians by schooling, that's an exponential curve.
At the last job I quit (an MSP), I gave my boss a bound book with all passwords. It was a fire list: these are the things you need to change when I leave to adhere to best security practices. I had him sign for receipt. I also gave the same book to the client who was endeared to me and was not fond of how I'd been treated by my boss. :D Rumor has it they spent roughly two months doing basic things like trying to figure out how to get access to systems to change the root and/or service passwords...
For desktop stuff, I have a solution to that: I have a small plywood shelf unit (think: post office mailbox sized shelves/boxes). Devices sit inside the box. Cables are threaded in through the back of the box, and excess length gets cinch tied into the box with the adapter plug. Right now I've got a 6x5 cubby cube, about 1.5'x2' in size. The power for the unit is on a surge protector bar, which is screwed into the wall above it. Excess cord (if there is any) dangles behind the desk in a natural loop. (I've also used cinch ties to make sure that power bricks hanging this way do not lose the power cord from their rear.)
As for networking:
Get 5 different cable colors and then each bundle needs to have no more than 5 cables. You then take those bundles of 5, which are small enough and convenient enough to neatly bundle or wrap in and of themselves, and bundle them together
Typically, I've found, you need 1 to 3 bundles per rack. Any extra runs can just hide or dangle free; it's still less mess. (If you're doing central switching instead of the more preferable top of rack switching, it's a bit of a pain in the ass. ) These bundles then get labeled - with a simple number. I can quickly figure out where something is plugged in by looking for that bundle on the switch and the appropriate color.
I prefer to do my bundling exclusively with Velcro but quick ties work pretty well at the 'switch side' of the cable to keep everything tight and neat, too.
(Or do bundles of 8 or something like that with 8 colors, whatever. 5 works out pretty well with pre-existing cables sometimes, too, though - red, blue, green, grey, black).
You may have missed where they were ripping out DNS subsystem functionality (interoperability with BIND and a couple other options, IIRC) and replacing it wholesale with their own samba4 DNS implementation. I think they did that during later betas, but I'm not sure.
OK, so if I want to have centralized login/credential management for my Windows workstations/laptops but don't want to let Windows near the server room, where do I start?
"Active Directory" or "Samba 4" are really the only two answers I'm aware of, and currently, I don't like either.
I have a samba box with Win7 auth via AD working fine, and serving 118MB/s over gig-e.
Um, no, you don't. You're completely full of shit. You may be sending 118 MB/s over the wire, but you're getting about 15-20% less than that, at best, due to CIFS/SMB overhead.
You do realize that 'administering' FreeNAS isn't the same as administering Samba, right? Just checking.
(I have found that the likelihood of issues with file sharing/whatever with Samba is fairly highly related to how well the 'integration' was handled beforehand by the distribution/packager, as is the case in FreeNAS. They polished that aspect very nicely.)
You realize that the guide you link is not only horribly out of date (over a year IIRC since alpha11 came out) and won't work with any of the current alpha (yeah, ALPHA) releases, but that Samba 4 has it's own dNS server now, basically requiring it operate autonomously from existing infrastructure?
Yes, building/installing and then provisioning Samba 4 takes all of about 5 minutes. Now integrate it with something which was in existence before you decide to stroke your balls with Samba 4... good luck, let me know how it goes.
Please consider a couple things: of all the Linux/Unix daemons I've had to administer, Samba is by far the most cumbersome and finicky, requiring the most attention regardless of distribution.
* It's usually not possible to run Debian's Samba(3) packages without pulling the backports. They won't work with anything remotely recent, more than likely.
* I've had several situations where upgrades on 'stable' releases of Linux have resulted in Samba bugs manifesting (twice resulting in an unplanned outage, personally). Regressions? Who knows. They're frequent enough that I can think of 3-4 that've occurred in the last couple years.
* This may be more the fault of ports, but I've had the samba FreeBSD ports distribution break configuration compatibility multiple times in just the past two years (using AD domain based authentication). My understanding is that Ports is fairly 'consistent' with upstream and this is suggestive of release problems upstream.
Also, samba is not 'consistently reliable'. Is it consistently stable? Very much so. However, I'd rather read slapd logs than samba logs; they're a fucking pit of vipers, and you'll end up learning more about SMB, CIFS, winbind, etc. protocols trying to figure out what's going on than your average high-quality Windows admin (you know, the ones with the high end certs) could even begin to understand. The unfortunate fact is, reading the logs for samba has always been fairly necessary, with a relatively high log verbosity; this doesn't bode well for reliability. ;) And this doesn't even delve into the problems encountered due to MS-pushed patching or eg. talking with poorly behaving Macs running old versions of Samba: truth be told, it doesn't seem to interoperate with itself all that well.
As a basic file and print service it does quite well, particularly on the CUPS print interchange role. But IMO it hasn't been a 'superior' file serving platform to Windows since 2008 came out. It's functionality is "marginal" unless you've got people willing and able to set up LDAP and backend it against that, or want to use Windows domain credentialing. (Even then, the ACLs can get a bit fubar.)
Sorry, what? Have you run Samba in a business environment? I have, and I can completely understand the sentiments here: there's a lot of little stuff that goes amiss or requires seemingly excessive management.
There are a LOT of "small glitches" while using Samba 3 in any not-just-Linux environment. It has nothing to do with 'poor administration'. Over the years, I have had problems with Windows - 98, XP, 2k, 2k3,Vista, and now W7 - operating properly against a Samba host. This isn't a matter of 'improperly administered' so much as it's a "Microsoft released a patch which broke things which worked previously" problem, and it seems to be getting worse as time goes on.
To add insult to injury, Samba 3 development has basically been in 'maintenance' mode for years, with Samba 4 getting seemingly preferential treatment. There have been very few new features of functionality added to Samba 3 aside from the odd "needed to keep things working well" patch or a backport from Samba 4 by an intrepid sysadmin (or so it seems). Really, what used to seem like a very nice and mature project now feels like something on life support, with half the features present having been backported from the development branch, often without a full implementation, inconsistencies, and no/poor documentation.
As for Samba 4, (which neither you nor my post's GP seem to realize we're talking about here): it's an entirely different beast than Samba 3. The only significant thing it appears to share in common with Samba 3 is the smb.conf format and actual file/print services (which is a fairly recent change). It is still in HEAVY development. What they started out to implement was really quite awesome and interesting: Active Directory based on open source tools currently in existence. At one point, they were using BIND for DNS integration and Heimdal for the directory. Their team members made many valiant attempts and efforts in providing patches to these supporting projects.
However...
Both those things are now internal to Samba 4. That's right: the directory itself as well as a DNS server are components to Samba 4. IMO, this is the biggest mistake they've made, and waiting would've been worth it if they could've gotten BIND to work (they couldn't, due to design differences between it and Windows AD/DNS frequency, chain of authority, etc. IIRC - not without making a mess).
Integration of their own directory (based on a heimdal fork, IIRC) makes sense. But not DNS, at least as its implemented now. The DNS server is not BIND compatible and will not take a zone transfer, and doesn't even do reverse records yet (not properly, at least).
THAT SAID, Samba 4 is still not hitting a 1.0 release. Who knows if 1.0 will mean 'beta, we're polishing' or 'production ready' - but I will bet you anything that it will be lacking documentation on how the tools work and have quite a few bugs. :(
I've been a follower of Samba 4 since I was in college, and that was close to a decade ago. I don't think there's much hope of it ever being production ready, not anymore. They tried to do too much, and as a result, Samba 4 won't be all that usable in an existing Samba 3 network where DNS is also used - it just won't be possible without making a huge mess of things due to a pre-existing DNS system which won't be able to be fully compatible.
Samba 4 works "OK" at home, but only if you've got very limited needs and you're starting from scratch. It's not nearly as flexible as Samba 3 (eg. different authentication backends, for instance) and from my point of view will not be 'production ready' for many years at its current pace.
Why does this make any sense at all? Amazon doesn't do the shipping, they just put it on a truck (or have the carrier pick it up, I'm not sure how that works). But the point is, they don't run the trucks, so they shouldn't be charging tax on shipping, just handling. There's really no reason, other than increasing profits illicitly or trying to play nice with the state, that they'd charge tax on both. They could figure out the difference if they really wanted to, they know what it costs to ship and to process things probably down to the tenth of a cent per package (on average).
(I'm sorry, but if these bastards can give me recommendations on dating advice and dealing with divorce books very shortly after my wife changed her facebook status, they can get these little details right.)
Every state requires that you pay sales tax on every out of state purchase. It does not matter if you order it over the phone, mail order, internet, or even drive across the border to buy something in person. Every state has a tax form to claim the amount of taxes owed that should be filed with your annual tax return.
No they don't. Oregon, Montana, Alaska, New Hampshire, and Delaware don't have sales tax. You know, a tenth of the country's states.
It may also be a surprise to you that some of the states don't double dip on income tax, either: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, Wyoming
(If you're observant and knowledge inclined, you may note a pattern/trend amongst these states which is not present in places like NY or CA, where sales and income taxes are high but the states are still completely strapped.)
I have to ask, where did these 15cm of sea level come from? That's not explicitly from global warming, not necessarily.
* different precipitation patterns may have resulted in less precipitation falling on the poles (ie climate change). Weather patterns are constantly changing.
* it's well known that pole ice pack has actually increased in depth over the last several years.
* the magnetic north pole has been rapidly shifting towards siberia over the past 50 years (which might impact weather, since the earth is essentially a giant magnet)
* all the while, the world's glaciers are still melting at roughly the same rate they have for the last millennia
* the past 50 years have seen copious amounts of water pumped from aquifers for use in industrial processes and general human consumption.
Here's a hint: when your model data keeps changing and taking drastically different perspectives on the same information, all with constantly disproven hypothesis, maybe the premise you reached before studying things is wrong, and you're missing something important. There are different hypothesises which explain the "higher sea level" scenario, but climatologists are unwilling to entertain them for purely dogmatic reasons, dismissing them purely out of hand.
So?
Just because this (mild) storm is hitting a densely populated industrial shoreline area not accustomed to hurricanes doesn't change the fact that a) people are over-reacting and b) the high population density of the area doesn't make the storm any worse than it was.
The places without power or fuel for their generators? They're getting it shipped in. There is power and plenty of fuel (gas/diesel) two hours from where the worst hit are. You know, a two hour commute is not unheard of or even all that uncommon in the area. These people were just unprepared, expecting the government to come and save them.
I'm sorry, but as someone who is accustomed to power outages occurring for weeks at a time, sometimes - and during the dead of winter - I really have no sympathy for them. This shit happens all the time. People were crying "racism" when the black people of New Orleans were looting and killing each other, and people brought attention to it. Well it wasn't racism, it was the same sentiment which makes me now say these mickish wops (I'm half irish, half italian) were fucking idiots and didn't prepare for what was before them. They had weeks of forewarning and they're goddamn lucky it wasn't as bad as everyone was saying it was going to be.
It's government we're talking about here, quite obviously. "Let's spend a lot more than we need to spend on something which won't be half as resilient as the common, industry accepted approach".
There's a reason why even nuclear power facilities use diesel generators. They're a good fall-back.
Absolutely.
It confounds me why people would put a high-area-requirement industrial facility in one of the most expensive locations in the world (same goes for San Francisco). Do you not see the value of moving it off the 3rd floor of an elaborate building in the Financial district? I know of many companies that do this and just have to 'wtf' when they obviously have the $$$ to locate it somewhere more sensible.
Sure, cost per server difference might be relatively negligible, but there are costs there which you wouldn't have elsewhere - travel, accessibility, facility cost and accessibility cost can all collude against you.
Hell, even the Facebook place up in the arctic is, in some ways, more accessible than somewhere like this: you're not going to have flooding, rioting, earthquakes, rioting, etc. from preventing your engineers/technicians from getting in. They'll already be there, and you've got enough actual land to stow 50k gallons of reserve fuel. In the grander scheme of things there are many other options that make more sense for a datacenter; the small-minded, culturally-centric types who run these things just aren't really able to see the obvious. :)
10-20 years?
I see where you got your numbers from, but my experience says otherwise. Most common non-residential underground tanks will last 30+ years without a problem (though they need to be regularly inspected and maintained, of course). Unlike in a residential heating oil setting, underground tanks (incl. fill stations but mainly gas stations) get regularly (think: weekly) inspected for water. This is also true for smaller operations: in diesel specifically, water content will encourage bacteria growth and make the fuel all but useless in a couple of weeks, destroying tens of thousands of reserve energy.
Not sure where you get the "infrastructure is 100 years old" idea. This isn't a movie with Italian gangsters lurking in the shadows, smoking cigars. Even though there's certainly infrastructure that old within the city, we're not talking about gas or electric mains. If we're talking about government in NYC, they regularly dispose of and replace perfectly good materials because they're simply old (we got close to 10k worth of terracotta roofing tile for a couple hundred dollars at auction). If we're talking about business, they're the richest businesses in the world and there is constant change going on with the buildings which hold their facilities. Above ground or below, it doesn't matter - they've got several of the highest quality generators with new tanks available to them.
* The EPA requires all above ground storage containers to have a secondary containment tank; my recollection is that it has to be 2/3 the total capacity of the actual tanks, though it may be 1.5 to account for eg. rainwater accumulation. This is probably why they don't put tanks with gensets on the roof.
* A good quality generator measures efficiency in hours per generator (depending on kwh rating and load, of course). We're not talking about a high pressure flow rate, we're talking about the passive volumetric pressure from the bottom of the tank being able to feed a motor many stories above without issue (assuming its a sizable tank).
* It's much easier to clean up spilled fuel at ground level (or above it, as the case may be ) than it is to clean up spilled fuel from an underground spill (ie, you really can't, especially when there's high "groundwater" levels as the case is here).
Try again. This is just a case of stupid gov't regulations contradicting other stupid gov't regulations, with one taking local precedence due to the local Fire Marshall enforcing more rigorously than the EPA. :)
Yes, but then you run into the problem of relying on gravity to keep the diesel inside the buckets.
I'm not sure how the argument that Apple's phones are somehow overpriced holds much water when they are very similar in price to Android handsets of similar quality like the Galaxy line.
Is this a serious statement? I'm having a hard time telling if it's sarcasm.
Yes, they have a similar price point.
No, they are not similar devices. Software functionality aside, the iPhone 5 is already getting a reputation of being of poor build quality. (Even amongst people who like iPhones 'because they just work', it's argued that the 4 is still better than the 5). If you include software build quality, the iPhone 5 doesn't even fully/properly support its own screen resolution. I will note that this is something that Android devices were able to handle suitably by Android 2.2, and did splendidly by 2.3.
The iPhones do not even approach the "Galaxy" line (presumably you mean Nexus devices). Not even the Nexus 4, made by LG.
Here's one:
If I have a nice new Maserati, and you want to drive it, you should offer to let me drive your custom off-road bog truck.
What Apple is doing is basically saying, "Let us drive your Maserati for a couple hours and we'll leave some change in the seat, and you can use the natural stream behind our house to fish for $10 a day."
It entirely depends on the vehicle, how fast the water is moving, soil type, and how long the roadway has been flooded (flooding and cross currents can destroy the road bedding before the road surface, which is dangerous, as it can result in the road actually 'falling' while you drive on it).
When I was 16, I was driving to state karate qualifications 2 hours away. It was in Spring, after a recent heavy rain. I'd been driving for an hour and a half when I came across a flooded road - about 100 yards worth. I was in an early 1990s Plymouth Voyager (Dodge Caravan). I took my shoes off, hiked up my pants, and walked across - it came up just about a foot, and there wasn't much of a current at all. So I crossed, slowly.
As long as your exhaust and air intake aren't impeded and the undercarriage doesn't (significantly) touch the water, you'll be fine. (It's funny watching lowered cars drive through a dip in the road and lose contact with said road during rainy season...)
Would I have been sound/sane to do so in a sedan or something else lower slung? No, it'd have been a fool's errand.
Now I've got a 4wd full size Blazer, with over 16" of under carriage clearance and a hood-level snorkel and top ported exhaust. If I wanted to (I don't) I could (hyperbolically) ford rivers in the thing.
That said... most people should probably just never drive, for lack of proper judgement. ;)
You know, it used to be that a fully submerged vehicle would be fully servicable again after a little TLC - pressure wash the inside and detail it, check or redo major electrical connections, and replace the radio - good to go. Modern vehicles have so many different failure modes compared to functionally comparable vehicles from 15-25 years ago, it's not even funny.
Hell, even a minor fender bender will functionally total most modern vehicles. Something which something from even 10-15 years ago could take and not be damaged outside cosmetics (functions 100%) will put something in the scrap heap. This is, in my observation, significantly more true for hybrids and EVs, some of which have the batteries IN the body (what were they thinking?!).
Both Plasma Active and to some degree, Android are modal. It's the same user interface with different contextual modes for input. Plasma does this much better from what I've seen.
Doing it exclusively poorly (such as in W8) is much more of a Microsoft innovation than it's endemic to the concept.
No, no. More like:
"See that orb, hanging out there in space like a goddamn motherfuckin' testicle? You think it's a moon. It looks like a fucking moon. But motherfucker, it's no more a moon than it is a giant gonad hanging out there for all to see. It's a space station, swarming with the seed of Imperial fucking spacecraft!"
Tarantino is nothing if not overly bombastic and masturbatory with his dialog.