Google does something similar. On a brand new Verizon FIOS line in Florida, in a new neighborhood they just hooked up (i.e., nice fresh IP's), Google was showing me Google.ca instead of Google.com. It was kind of annoying, but they finally fixed it.
I like MaxMind GeoIP for trying to resolve users to their physical location, but even that isn't perfect. At the same time that Google was identifying me as being in Canada, GeoIP knew I was in the US somewhere, but couldn't place me to even a state (they give the coordinates of the middle of the country for those users).
A friend of mine has a web site which he wanted to provide maps on to various events around the US. For most of the users, it was nice, and would show from the users home area to the event. Sometimes it was WAY off. We provided them a way to put in their home city or address for accurate maps.
I was trying to explain Internet topography to some folks one day, and it wasn't going so well, so I demonstrated it like this.
We're sitting here on residential/business provider X (eventually using a crappy provider)
I have a server up on a Tier 1 provider Y here in town (a good one at that)
A friend has a server on a business class line Z, also in town.
We have servers in datacenters in other cities, DC1 DC2 and DC3.
The traceroute from X to Y goes to a city 1000 miles away and then back.
The traceroute from X to Y goes to a different city in a different direction, 500 miles away.
The traceroutes from X to DC1 DC2 and DC3 go through all kinds of weird paths.
By your logic, none of these would show a local relationship, except possibly if the user happened to use the same provider.
The obvious choice would be, pick a provider who has better peering arrangements with other providers in that city. Good luck finding that easily. You're still going to alienate quite a few local users
Back to the above scenarios.
They kept provider X, but added on provider A and B in the office also. All used different Tier 1 providers. Most of the time they had different results too.
For giggles the other day, I put together a little mapping program. I had a nice one written once, but it's dead. I mapped the routes from several points, including setting static routes to use A B and X. The map got very very complex very quickly, even though it was only showing a dozen endpoints. It was a simple Graphviz map. You could see how providers shared routers (sometimes peerings, sometimes not) at various points, even though they should have usually been separate.
Running traceroutes by hand gives you an impression of how it is. A full fledged map of "here's the world from points A B and X to DC1 DC2 and DC3 gives a more complete view of how it really works, which doesn't lend nicely to knowing "a short ttl means they're my neighbor."
If that's what you really believe, more power to you.
If you'd like to stand up in front of Congress and in front of America on CSPAN, and make that statement, I'd be very proud of you. Oh wait. You can't. You wouldn't be allowed. Neither would I, or the majority of Slashdot readers. (I say majority, as there may just be a congressional rep or two reading here).
We the people can't tell a carrier group to stand down.
We the people can't declare income taxes are invalid and shouldn't be paid.
We the people can't even just stop by the White House and visit with the President. We can't even get close enough to the front door to ring the doorbell. That is, the doorbell by the door, not the one with armed guards at the gate.
We the people can't hop in our car and drive to Area 51. No, I don't expect aliens, but I do expect something that they built big runways for.:)
We the people are told we have power, because we occasionally get to make something resembling a decision, but the rest of the time we are told exactly how it is.
There is a reality that we have to live in, and this is it. Our government isn't run by us, we mearly make occasional suggestions.
I was driving the other day, and thought about that movie. But by the time I got anywhere close to where I was heading, I forgot what I wanted to see... It was a long and amazingly mind numbing drive.
You wouldn't believe how many computers I've had to do virus cleanups on, that were "protected" by AVG. I always replace it with Avast, and they never have any problems after that.
People never quite understand that the government has the most to gain by making things illegal. Not only do they get fines and other penalties from those who are in that industry, but it allows them to keep the market value overinflated and they can squeeze out any other big players by simply leaking information on them to local law enforcement or other federal agencies.
There's nothing like having a C130 loaded with guns or drugs (or both), and simply saying "You don't see this plane. It was never here." You only hear about the ones where the planes have crashed inconveniently in the wrong place, and the site wasn't able to be isolated before the news leaked.
Really, it does give some control, and an acceptable covert budget. Things are going to be smuggled in anyways, why can't the gov't make a profit on it?:)
Excuse me. There's a black van outside, and some nice man knocking on my door.
I went in on very very rare occasions, usually when someone asked me to go with them. I can summarize every visit as the same.
A half dozen or so people would ask "Can I help you?". We'd get to the department where the item would be, see the price was way over what it should be, compare other items, all at higher than expected prices, and within just a couple minutes, be asked "Can I help you?", frequently by the same "friendly" people who already asked me and I told them that I was fine.
On the way back out, I'd be asked at least a half dozen times "Can I help you?" even though I made no eye contact, and wasn't even looking at the items. I was walking *THROUGH* the department, not shopping in that department. Obviously, there's nothing you can help me with in that department.
Mind you, I'm not downright rude. I will smile and nod, or even say "hi", in the casual "hi, I'm walking past you, but I'm not trying to start a conversation" kind of way.
When I'm shopping, I know what I'm looking for. I generally know all the specs on the item in question. I can read the price tag. Outside of that, what can they really help me with? I approach sales people if I can't find something. I never ask questions unless I want to entertain myself by seeing if the people in the department have a clue.
I'm a good customer. I come in, I buy things, I leave. I don't waste anyone's time, and I'm in the store for as little time as possible.
It was very rare in any store to find a sales rep who knew the product that I was looking for. I may be a little behind the times on a few things, like car stereos (I haven't wanted or needed to change one in several years). More often than not, regardless of the store, I've overheard conversations between customers and sales reps, and they'd spew incorrect information.
The new CompUSA folks have been cooperative though. I can't say the stores I've been in are great, but at least they admit when they don't know something. I was looking for an IDE (aka PATA) laptop drive for an old tablet. They didn't have any in stock, and told me that they honestly didn't expect to get any in. I asked about the drives in the external carriers. They didn't know if they were PATA or SATA, and they helped me look online. When I asked to do the searching because I'm faster, they let me. They didn't hover. They didn't try to upsell. They were available, but not pushy.
If I get pushy, hovering, overly friendly "can I help you, let me stalk you through the store until you let me help you, I won't leave you alone until you buy something", I leave.
It's the same reason I won't give my name and phone number when I go onto a car lot, if I just want to read the price tag. Those bastards will keep calling you for months trying to make the sale.
Actually, I've known some too, on a friendly, not professional basis. It's an interesting business to learn about, but not the safest out there.
I believe the terminology varies by area, as do some of the terms. In the end it's all the same. Guy is lonely, and wants to spend time with a pretty girl. Guy leaves some money in a conspicuous place. Adult things happen. Guy leaves happy. Girl leaves happy and a little richer.
My apologies, as I'm used to referencing proper professionals (versus street walkers) as escorts. No offense is intended.
Myself, I see no problem with it. I don't believe it should be against the law.
When I was in Toronto, I was in for a bit of a culture shock when I talked to some people there. Massage parlors, incall, outcall, and even "full service" strip clubs are perfectly acceptable. Toronto does not allow "street walkers". The general idea is, it's going to happen, like it or not. Be courteous. Anything that happens in the privacy of your [home|hotel|etc] between two consenting adults is exactly that.
I was addressing it from the law enforcement side. The majority of areas in the US have laws against it, and those are enforced. If they want to enforce it, there are much easier ways to enforce it, than to shut down one of the easiest places to make a visible statement. So you've picked up all the obvious street walkers, so they don't walk the streets. The next most visible is Craigslist, or any of many numerous print advertisements that list providers of these services. There will always be some web site that carries advertisements. Hell, searching Google is the most obvious.
**WARNING** Links NSFW! I'm writing most of this for those who are completely naive. Hey, lots of people don't know the business. I just happen to talk to a lot of people, and escorts have been some of them.
Sorry, there are only over 300,000 pages for the "GirlFriend Experience" in Chicago.
Ok, so there are about 350 postings today on http://chicago.craigslist.org/ers, and anyone who has a clue knows a decent percentage of these are duplicates, fake pictures (wrong girl shows up) or trouble (thug comes, takes your money, and laughs on the way out the door). Some are legit.
If they legalized it, a lot of the problems would go away. Right now, if a thug instead of the shown pretty girl shows up and robs you, you can't do much about it. Try calling the police and say "I was trying to pay for an escort, but some guy came and robbed me instead!". That's a spontaneous confession, and enough to land you in jail at least for the night. Talk about adding insult to injury. If it's perfectly legal, the same phone call would get the cops to your door, and hopefully get your money back and land the thug in jail. There is a whole list of other reasons that it should be legalized, that's only one minor example.
As I've been told many times before, it doesn't matter if it's an escort, a girlfriend, or a wife, you're always paying for sex. At least with an escort, you know the terms of what you're paying for. You will pay $x for $y hours. When the night is done, she'll leave (or you'll leave, depending on who's place it is), and you won't ever have to talk to her again unless you want to. With a girlfriend, you'll buy dinner, flowers, pay for movies, whatever, and then sex in the end isn't guaranteed. And once you're married, the guarantee is that you'll pay for the rest of your life, and sex may happen occasionally if you're lucky.:)
Most people in an investigative field would BEG for lists like this.
The posting gives probable cause. They can wire tap the numbers, and get the phone history. The secondary numbers that call common numbers give even more escorts, or escort services/pimps. Third level cross reference would then likely give him a good number of the working girls in the area, and regular clients. All of this would be legal.
Many law enforcement agencies are using these ads to DO the busts. They'll set up a wired hotel room, and have the girls meet them there. They'll also have officers pose as the escorts, and do the same to the Johns.
They're being spoon fed fairly reliable information. The exception would be postings by angry ex-boyfriends/husbands, who post their ex-SO picture and phone numbers. Those would be easily filtered once the phone records were given a good look over.
I don't know what idiot thought about filing a complaint against Craigslist. They should be THANKING them. Spend a couple months gathering intelligence, and then spend a weekend on widespread busts. They'd get a significant number in the process, and the rest would be scared out of business. Any remaining ones that decided to continue marketing this way would be continued easy fish to catch.
Do your job, and you've solved the problem. Cutting out an advertising source just pushes that element that you want to arrest into other fringe areas that you probably don't know about yet. Doing it right would get the vice squad brownie points from all over the place, and an increased budget. Just bitching about the advertising medium gets you nothing but a budget wasted on court costs.
But, Windows Update, along with all those warm fuzzy programs written in Microsoft languages, use Microsoft DLL's to do things. They'll leave behind all the DLL's, or everything will break, so all that's missing may (may) be only the iexplore.exe
His answer shows a preconception of the guilt or innocence of the defendant.
Since he was not open to the option of life in prison vs death sentence, it shows that he has already decided the person's guilt.
A good jury should have absolutely no preconceptions of what the innocence or guilt of the person are, and the facts presented in court should be the truth and enough for a jury to make the decision.
It doesn't really work like that though.
I haven't yet made it onto a jury. I'm very intelligent. I have had formal law enforcement training. I have no preconceptions based on anything.
The defense usually won't like me if they have a weak case. Maybe I'll side with law enforcement, because I had some training in the past. Maybe I'm too smart, and any story they come up with, I'll be able to see right through.
The prosecution may not want me. If they have a weak case, I'll see right through it. Since I'm not working in law enforcement at this time, maybe I have a grudge against the system, and will torpedo the prosecutions case during jury deliberation.
In any case, the weaker side wouldn't want me anywhere near the case, because I am smart, and can help people see little things that they usually wouldn't. (Did you notice witness A and B both lied about evidence X?). I can be annoying to watch TV or a movie with, so usually I keep my mouth shut. I catch inconsistencies and plot twists pretty easily, and can tell you who the real bad guy is, except in Scoobie Doo mysteries.:)
So, I've showed up to be on several juries, and have yet to actually serve on one.
Really, I hope if the day comes, you are right. If that day comes, I'll do my best to help as many people as I can. I can only hope there are enough people around that will do the same thing.
I know how to do those things. I, by myself, or with a small group, could likely survive pretty well. But, I am 1. What about the rest of the millions. We would likely still run into serious problems. Sure, we may find farmland that has supplies for us, but others are going to find the same land. The owner may not be pleased with my group of a dozen or so taking up camp and eating his crops. If we established a camp, others will come and ask for (and then take) our supplies. There's no way that I could set up in a day for thousands... or tens of thousands.
In the county I'm in, there are an average of 1000 people per square mile. This area is a mix of urban and rural. You'd be amazed how far the smell of cooking food goes, especially when people are hungry. Dinner for a dozen can't sustain even 1000.
How do you think fields were plowed and trade carried out before we'd invented motor vehicles?
This is a wonderful argument. Don't worry, you aren't the first one to say it to me, but you are the first on this thread.
Brute force and work animals, of course. Hand operated machines. Even people dragging small plows by hand. But.... Say tonight is the end, and tomorrow we wake up to by previously described scenario. Where would you find a mule, a horse, a hand powered water pump.
You also don't need a direct supply of water to survive although how many people wouldn't have a stream or river within a decent distance?
Would you drink from the Hudson river? I happen to be in a rather wet area. The largest nearby river is not safe to drink or swim in due to bacteria. Many retention ponds (natural and man made) exist in the area, but those are questionably safe to drink.
Waste water is a bigger concern. It may not be in the first few days, but how long would it be without having running water and working sewage systems, that human waste contamination rendered those local supplies contaminated?
We only need tractors because we're farming to provide food for millions, most of which are those urbanites. If you no longer need to farm on the scale required to feed the now irrelevant urbanites, then why do you even need a tractor? Any urbanites that came along could be given the choice of working the land you can no longer work to produce their own food.
I like that idea. "Given a choice." You know on day #1, given an empty piece of land, a fistful of seeds, and a hoe, all you have is that. It takes months for crops to grow. I don't know about you, but us humans will die if we don't eat in months.
I think realistically what you'd see is a quick increase in rural population as people left the cities, followed by a decline as people fought for resources followed by it reaching an equilibrium that was somewhat above that of the initial rural population as rural areas can provide for far more people than currently live there - mostly because as mentioned, they feed the cities in the first place.
When you go to the grocery store again, look carefully at the boxes or labels in the fresh produce area. You'll find many or most are imported. Then start checking the frozen produce. The more you look, the more you'll find that most of your food doesn't come from anywhere near you.
I've talked about this whole concept in depth with various people. Being a good gun owning American, I do agree. There are variables to this though. Who is better at long range accurate shooting and ammunition conservation?
1) A thug from a metro area, has killed several people in drug/gang violence, but hasn't yet been caught.
2) A mafia "enforcer".
3) A good ol' country hick, who is 3rd generation on his families 100 acre farm.
All good sterotypes implied.
While I'd like #1 or #2 on my side for any sort of urban combat, when you get out into rural farmland, #3 is likely to be the clear winner. Most city dwellers didn't grow up shooting squirrels in their back yards. Many may not have even tried to move around silently in the woods. Most have no practice with hunting, tracking, and/or trapping. They can find their target in the city through social connections, and adjust their standard of living dramatically (think bloody and painful).
There's always dumb luck too, so the result can't be guaranteed. I would be #4 on the list, and unless I have a personal interest in any side, since we'd all be fighting over the same resources, I'd stay out of their way until they were done.
If you're directly connected to the provider (like you have a cat5 or fiber connect going to your switch), they frequently cache the MAC address on their switch. Providers I've played this with usually have a 4 hour expiration. You can move the virtual IP, but you'll be waiting 4 hours before it actually hits the new server.
In a more moderate world, sure, moving a virtual IP works fine.:)
You should be careful what you submit. You asked about 1,000 users, you got answers for 1,000 users.
I just posted a brief overview of what it takes to handle millions a day. There may be a lot of theorists and wannabe's on here, but I've actually lived it (for years at that).
You can contact me directly through my web site (linked in my profile). A little advice is free.:) I'm more than happy to share what I know.
You have 600 customers that pay on average $5,000,000 . What the hell are you selling?
Ya, at $5 million/customer, you can afford to give them all kinds of warm fuzzy goodness. Hell, you could have a GigE line from every Tier 1 provider, and huge beautiful server farms, AND refresh it every quarter.:)
I'd love to just sit in the accounts receivable office to hear the phone calls. "This months bill is due, that will be $415,000. Would you like to make that payment over the phone."
I suppose budget meetings are a bit easier there.
"I need a million dollars for new switches." "Ok. We'll slate that as 1 million 5, just in case you go over":) "Well, I was looking at some new 16 core servers. Loaded they'll be in the ballpark of $20k" "Sure, get 10 and let us know how they work. You can just pull that out of petty cash.":)
For the rest of us in the real world, we don't get those luxuries.
With my news site, when we first showed up on the front of Google News, it killed us. We went from a few hundred viewers a day to several thousand a minute.
Limited caching was our best cure. It caches dynamic content for unvalidated users (like, not logged in) for 3 seconds. It doesn't sound like a lot (because it isn't), but the front page may take about 5 hits to the database. At 10,000 users per minute, that's 500 in 3 seconds, or 2500 queries. The 3 seconds number is adjustable too. Would anyone notice if I changed it to 10 or even 30? Nope. I'd notice based on server and database performance though. Why beat up on the database if I don't need to.:)
With the caching on, the only thing that hits frequently is the counter that keeps track of the number of times a story is read. One update versus several larger queries is much easier.
Have you actually worked with DRBD? It's neat once it works, but when it fails, it's messy. I knew someone who had a perfectly good working environment until it flipped out one day. The two DRBD servers fell out of sync. One stayed down, one stayed up, which was expected. One day, the one that had been down for months came up as master, and the other died. Suddenly they're using a database that's months old, *AND* DRBD brought the other one in sync. Everything that had happened for months suddenly disappeared.
I would have blamed user intervention, except no users touched anything. It's hackish at best, and catastrophic at worst. In testing, I failed a pair quite a few times. In the first dozen or so failures it handled fine. Then it didn't. What do you do when both nodes don't want to play? Well, you're dead in the water until you can convince at least one to play nice again.
I started giggling when I saw the "1000 per day" number. Wheee! If he can't get an old server to handle that, he's doing it wrong.
For fun, ya, two servers kept in sync with rsync, would be fine. Maybe three? Sure, why not, the company has money to burn. Oh wait, it's a non-profit.
My old shop was geared up for several thousand users simultaniously. It's uniques were around 4 million/day on a very slow day, and over 10 million per day on a good day. That was basically what I just said above, except with more servers and a better rsync method. That site, because of it's size, was broken down into 3 pieces (3 hostnames). All of the site content for all the sites were replicated (rsync) across about 15 to 25 servers. 15 servers were put in DNS (DNS RR) for each site, and then they were balanced by giving more robust machines multiple A records, and less robust machines fewer. Because it was always growing, we always had some older hardware that we hadn't retired yet, with the newer better stuff. They could be simply categorized as level 1, 2, or 3. The level would equate to the number of A records it had in DNS, and the amount of load it could take (1x load, 2x load, or 3x load).
When a server took a poop, or a datacenter disappeared (it happens, even with 99.999% uptime guarantees), we just saw traffic jump up on the other servers, and of course we'd get a page letting us know something died.
It wasn't fancy, but it wasn't expensive, and was easy to maintain. Want to add a server? Bring up a bare machine. Sync it up. When it's done syncing, and added to the normal sync cycle, add it's IP into DNS. Want to bring a server down? Take it out of DNS. Most users went away within 5 minutes (short ttl). Some stragglers would go away within the hour. So, yank the machine out after an hour to be safe. But, if a machine died, well, it was safe to yank immediately.:)
We usually sat at under 50% utilization, but sometimes I'd test to see what individual machines could take. Give them extra A records, and drop some others off. Is our total utilization still the same? Yes, then everything's ok. Oh wow, look, we're at 160Mb/s. This was a while back, and we only had 100Mb/s ports on the switches, but we used TEQL to share two ports.
So, sitting at 40% utilization, when we lost a datacenter (we had at 3), each would jump to a whopping 60% instead. If we lost two (it never happened, but was good theory), we'd have to bring up some of the hot spares because we'd now be at 120%.
It was always fun to test just one datacenter. We had occasional bandwidth problems. Providers would have some problem that they couldn't identify, and saying "hey, we're having problems going over 600Mb/s on that GigE circuit" usually came back with blank stares. So, I'd shunt a whole bunch of traffic over to it with them on the phone. They'd usually say "Stop it! You're causing problems with the other customers in that DC!":) It made getting problems fixed a little easier when you can do that.
But, back to TFA.... 2 servers are fine. If it has a DB back end, a good DB server, and maybe a replicated spare would be good, so he *could* be looking at 4. He could safely get away with just one though.
Oh, and all of my stuff was Linux, with regular Cisco Catalyst stitches (like 3500's). Cat5/6 to the machines. GigE fiber to the provider. Don't forget your power managers (APC masterswitch) so you can kick a machine in the middle of the night without going for a drive.
Slashdot Mirror
Google does something similar. On a brand new Verizon FIOS line in Florida, in a new neighborhood they just hooked up (i.e., nice fresh IP's), Google was showing me Google.ca instead of Google.com. It was kind of annoying, but they finally fixed it.
I like MaxMind GeoIP for trying to resolve users to their physical location, but even that isn't perfect. At the same time that Google was identifying me as being in Canada, GeoIP knew I was in the US somewhere, but couldn't place me to even a state (they give the coordinates of the middle of the country for those users).
A friend of mine has a web site which he wanted to provide maps on to various events around the US. For most of the users, it was nice, and would show from the users home area to the event. Sometimes it was WAY off. We provided them a way to put in their home city or address for accurate maps.
Good idea. Not so good in practice though.
I was trying to explain Internet topography to some folks one day, and it wasn't going so well, so I demonstrated it like this.
We're sitting here on residential/business provider X (eventually using a crappy provider)
I have a server up on a Tier 1 provider Y here in town (a good one at that)
A friend has a server on a business class line Z, also in town.
We have servers in datacenters in other cities, DC1 DC2 and DC3.
The traceroute from X to Y goes to a city 1000 miles away and then back.
The traceroute from X to Y goes to a different city in a different direction, 500 miles away.
The traceroutes from X to DC1 DC2 and DC3 go through all kinds of weird paths.
By your logic, none of these would show a local relationship, except possibly if the user happened to use the same provider.
The obvious choice would be, pick a provider who has better peering arrangements with other providers in that city. Good luck finding that easily. You're still going to alienate quite a few local users
Back to the above scenarios.
They kept provider X, but added on provider A and B in the office also. All used different Tier 1 providers. Most of the time they had different results too.
For giggles the other day, I put together a little mapping program. I had a nice one written once, but it's dead. I mapped the routes from several points, including setting static routes to use A B and X. The map got very very complex very quickly, even though it was only showing a dozen endpoints. It was a simple Graphviz map. You could see how providers shared routers (sometimes peerings, sometimes not) at various points, even though they should have usually been separate.
Running traceroutes by hand gives you an impression of how it is. A full fledged map of "here's the world from points A B and X to DC1 DC2 and DC3 gives a more complete view of how it really works, which doesn't lend nicely to knowing "a short ttl means they're my neighbor."
I'm on the 10.0.0.0 network, you insensitive clod! :)
If that's what you really believe, more power to you.
If you'd like to stand up in front of Congress and in front of America on CSPAN, and make that statement, I'd be very proud of you. Oh wait. You can't. You wouldn't be allowed. Neither would I, or the majority of Slashdot readers. (I say majority, as there may just be a congressional rep or two reading here).
We the people can't tell a carrier group to stand down.
We the people can't declare income taxes are invalid and shouldn't be paid.
We the people can't even just stop by the White House and visit with the President. We can't even get close enough to the front door to ring the doorbell. That is, the doorbell by the door, not the one with armed guards at the gate.
We the people can't hop in our car and drive to Area 51. No, I don't expect aliens, but I do expect something that they built big runways for. :)
We the people are told we have power, because we occasionally get to make something resembling a decision, but the rest of the time we are told exactly how it is.
There is a reality that we have to live in, and this is it. Our government isn't run by us, we mearly make occasional suggestions.
That's the movie I wanted to see again!
I was driving the other day, and thought about that movie. But by the time I got anywhere close to where I was heading, I forgot what I wanted to see... It was a long and amazingly mind numbing drive.
So, you were the one good guy there, eh? :) Too bad I never made it to your store.
You wouldn't believe how many computers I've had to do virus cleanups on, that were "protected" by AVG. I always replace it with Avast, and they never have any problems after that.
Oh, that would be hilarious ... if it wasn't true.
People never quite understand that the government has the most to gain by making things illegal. Not only do they get fines and other penalties from those who are in that industry, but it allows them to keep the market value overinflated and they can squeeze out any other big players by simply leaking information on them to local law enforcement or other federal agencies.
There's nothing like having a C130 loaded with guns or drugs (or both), and simply saying "You don't see this plane. It was never here." You only hear about the ones where the planes have crashed inconveniently in the wrong place, and the site wasn't able to be isolated before the news leaked.
Really, it does give some control, and an acceptable covert budget. Things are going to be smuggled in anyways, why can't the gov't make a profit on it? :)
Excuse me. There's a black van outside, and some nice man knocking on my door.
Hello?
[thud]
That's exactly why I didn't shop at Circuit City.
I went in on very very rare occasions, usually when someone asked me to go with them. I can summarize every visit as the same.
A half dozen or so people would ask "Can I help you?". We'd get to the department where the item would be, see the price was way over what it should be, compare other items, all at higher than expected prices, and within just a couple minutes, be asked "Can I help you?", frequently by the same "friendly" people who already asked me and I told them that I was fine.
On the way back out, I'd be asked at least a half dozen times "Can I help you?" even though I made no eye contact, and wasn't even looking at the items. I was walking *THROUGH* the department, not shopping in that department. Obviously, there's nothing you can help me with in that department.
Mind you, I'm not downright rude. I will smile and nod, or even say "hi", in the casual "hi, I'm walking past you, but I'm not trying to start a conversation" kind of way.
When I'm shopping, I know what I'm looking for. I generally know all the specs on the item in question. I can read the price tag. Outside of that, what can they really help me with? I approach sales people if I can't find something. I never ask questions unless I want to entertain myself by seeing if the people in the department have a clue.
I'm a good customer. I come in, I buy things, I leave. I don't waste anyone's time, and I'm in the store for as little time as possible.
It was very rare in any store to find a sales rep who knew the product that I was looking for. I may be a little behind the times on a few things, like car stereos (I haven't wanted or needed to change one in several years). More often than not, regardless of the store, I've overheard conversations between customers and sales reps, and they'd spew incorrect information.
The new CompUSA folks have been cooperative though. I can't say the stores I've been in are great, but at least they admit when they don't know something. I was looking for an IDE (aka PATA) laptop drive for an old tablet. They didn't have any in stock, and told me that they honestly didn't expect to get any in. I asked about the drives in the external carriers. They didn't know if they were PATA or SATA, and they helped me look online. When I asked to do the searching because I'm faster, they let me. They didn't hover. They didn't try to upsell. They were available, but not pushy.
If I get pushy, hovering, overly friendly "can I help you, let me stalk you through the store until you let me help you, I won't leave you alone until you buy something", I leave.
It's the same reason I won't give my name and phone number when I go onto a car lot, if I just want to read the price tag. Those bastards will keep calling you for months trying to make the sale.
Building a facility, and knowing what will be inside it are two completely different things.
"You're here to build an office building, a big warehouse, and a large dock"
Big deal. It could be moving plastic dog turds from China, or ... well ... a base for storing nukes and docking nuclear submarines. :)
If the folks requesting the work to be done did their job right, the cover story will adequately explain the facility.
Ya, that one was taken in 1969. It's a base, actually, (on the edge of a sea by the same name), located at 004115N, 232600W
But, duplicate or recycled names aren't completely unheard of. One in particular comes to mind as being recycled many times over.
Actually, I've known some too, on a friendly, not professional basis. It's an interesting business to learn about, but not the safest out there.
I believe the terminology varies by area, as do some of the terms. In the end it's all the same. Guy is lonely, and wants to spend time with a pretty girl. Guy leaves some money in a conspicuous place. Adult things happen. Guy leaves happy. Girl leaves happy and a little richer.
My apologies, as I'm used to referencing proper professionals (versus street walkers) as escorts. No offense is intended.
Myself, I see no problem with it. I don't believe it should be against the law.
When I was in Toronto, I was in for a bit of a culture shock when I talked to some people there. Massage parlors, incall, outcall, and even "full service" strip clubs are perfectly acceptable. Toronto does not allow "street walkers". The general idea is, it's going to happen, like it or not. Be courteous. Anything that happens in the privacy of your [home|hotel|etc] between two consenting adults is exactly that.
I was addressing it from the law enforcement side. The majority of areas in the US have laws against it, and those are enforced. If they want to enforce it, there are much easier ways to enforce it, than to shut down one of the easiest places to make a visible statement. So you've picked up all the obvious street walkers, so they don't walk the streets. The next most visible is Craigslist, or any of many numerous print advertisements that list providers of these services. There will always be some web site that carries advertisements. Hell, searching Google is the most obvious.
**WARNING** Links NSFW! I'm writing most of this for those who are completely naive. Hey, lots of people don't know the business. I just happen to talk to a lot of people, and escorts have been some of them.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=chicago+escort
or even searching for the full deal
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=chicago+escort+gfe
Sorry, there are only over 300,000 pages for the "GirlFriend Experience" in Chicago.
Ok, so there are about 350 postings today on http://chicago.craigslist.org/ers, and anyone who has a clue knows a decent percentage of these are duplicates, fake pictures (wrong girl shows up) or trouble (thug comes, takes your money, and laughs on the way out the door). Some are legit.
If they legalized it, a lot of the problems would go away. Right now, if a thug instead of the shown pretty girl shows up and robs you, you can't do much about it. Try calling the police and say "I was trying to pay for an escort, but some guy came and robbed me instead!". That's a spontaneous confession, and enough to land you in jail at least for the night. Talk about adding insult to injury. If it's perfectly legal, the same phone call would get the cops to your door, and hopefully get your money back and land the thug in jail. There is a whole list of other reasons that it should be legalized, that's only one minor example.
As I've been told many times before, it doesn't matter if it's an escort, a girlfriend, or a wife, you're always paying for sex. At least with an escort, you know the terms of what you're paying for. You will pay $x for $y hours. When the night is done, she'll leave (or you'll leave, depending on who's place it is), and you won't ever have to talk to her again unless you want to. With a girlfriend, you'll buy dinner, flowers, pay for movies, whatever, and then sex in the end isn't guaranteed. And once you're married, the guarantee is that you'll pay for the rest of your life, and sex may happen occasionally if you're lucky. :)
He's stupid.
Most people in an investigative field would BEG for lists like this.
The posting gives probable cause. They can wire tap the numbers, and get the phone history. The secondary numbers that call common numbers give even more escorts, or escort services/pimps. Third level cross reference would then likely give him a good number of the working girls in the area, and regular clients. All of this would be legal.
Many law enforcement agencies are using these ads to DO the busts. They'll set up a wired hotel room, and have the girls meet them there. They'll also have officers pose as the escorts, and do the same to the Johns.
They're being spoon fed fairly reliable information. The exception would be postings by angry ex-boyfriends/husbands, who post their ex-SO picture and phone numbers. Those would be easily filtered once the phone records were given a good look over.
I don't know what idiot thought about filing a complaint against Craigslist. They should be THANKING them. Spend a couple months gathering intelligence, and then spend a weekend on widespread busts. They'd get a significant number in the process, and the rest would be scared out of business. Any remaining ones that decided to continue marketing this way would be continued easy fish to catch.
Do your job, and you've solved the problem. Cutting out an advertising source just pushes that element that you want to arrest into other fringe areas that you probably don't know about yet. Doing it right would get the vice squad brownie points from all over the place, and an increased budget. Just bitching about the advertising medium gets you nothing but a budget wasted on court costs.
Stupid people.
But, Windows Update, along with all those warm fuzzy programs written in Microsoft languages, use Microsoft DLL's to do things. They'll leave behind all the DLL's, or everything will break, so all that's missing may (may) be only the iexplore.exe
Yippie skippie.
His answer shows a preconception of the guilt or innocence of the defendant.
Since he was not open to the option of life in prison vs death sentence, it shows that he has already decided the person's guilt.
A good jury should have absolutely no preconceptions of what the innocence or guilt of the person are, and the facts presented in court should be the truth and enough for a jury to make the decision.
It doesn't really work like that though.
I haven't yet made it onto a jury. I'm very intelligent. I have had formal law enforcement training. I have no preconceptions based on anything.
The defense usually won't like me if they have a weak case. Maybe I'll side with law enforcement, because I had some training in the past. Maybe I'm too smart, and any story they come up with, I'll be able to see right through.
The prosecution may not want me. If they have a weak case, I'll see right through it. Since I'm not working in law enforcement at this time, maybe I have a grudge against the system, and will torpedo the prosecutions case during jury deliberation.
In any case, the weaker side wouldn't want me anywhere near the case, because I am smart, and can help people see little things that they usually wouldn't. (Did you notice witness A and B both lied about evidence X?). I can be annoying to watch TV or a movie with, so usually I keep my mouth shut. I catch inconsistencies and plot twists pretty easily, and can tell you who the real bad guy is, except in Scoobie Doo mysteries. :)
So, I've showed up to be on several juries, and have yet to actually serve on one.
Really, I hope if the day comes, you are right. If that day comes, I'll do my best to help as many people as I can. I can only hope there are enough people around that will do the same thing.
I'll just skip to your question.
I know how to do those things. I, by myself, or with a small group, could likely survive pretty well. But, I am 1. What about the rest of the millions. We would likely still run into serious problems. Sure, we may find farmland that has supplies for us, but others are going to find the same land. The owner may not be pleased with my group of a dozen or so taking up camp and eating his crops. If we established a camp, others will come and ask for (and then take) our supplies. There's no way that I could set up in a day for thousands... or tens of thousands.
In the county I'm in, there are an average of 1000 people per square mile. This area is a mix of urban and rural. You'd be amazed how far the smell of cooking food goes, especially when people are hungry. Dinner for a dozen can't sustain even 1000.
How do you suggest to deal with this?
How do you think fields were plowed and trade carried out before we'd invented motor vehicles?
This is a wonderful argument. Don't worry, you aren't the first one to say it to me, but you are the first on this thread.
Brute force and work animals, of course. Hand operated machines. Even people dragging small plows by hand. But.... Say tonight is the end, and tomorrow we wake up to by previously described scenario. Where would you find a mule, a horse, a hand powered water pump.
You also don't need a direct supply of water to survive although how many people wouldn't have a stream or river within a decent distance?
Would you drink from the Hudson river? I happen to be in a rather wet area. The largest nearby river is not safe to drink or swim in due to bacteria. Many retention ponds (natural and man made) exist in the area, but those are questionably safe to drink.
Waste water is a bigger concern. It may not be in the first few days, but how long would it be without having running water and working sewage systems, that human waste contamination rendered those local supplies contaminated?
We only need tractors because we're farming to provide food for millions, most of which are those urbanites. If you no longer need to farm on the scale required to feed the now irrelevant urbanites, then why do you even need a tractor? Any urbanites that came along could be given the choice of working the land you can no longer work to produce their own food.
I like that idea. "Given a choice." You know on day #1, given an empty piece of land, a fistful of seeds, and a hoe, all you have is that. It takes months for crops to grow. I don't know about you, but us humans will die if we don't eat in months.
I think realistically what you'd see is a quick increase in rural population as people left the cities, followed by a decline as people fought for resources followed by it reaching an equilibrium that was somewhat above that of the initial rural population as rural areas can provide for far more people than currently live there - mostly because as mentioned, they feed the cities in the first place.
When you go to the grocery store again, look carefully at the boxes or labels in the fresh produce area. You'll find many or most are imported. Then start checking the frozen produce. The more you look, the more you'll find that most of your food doesn't come from anywhere near you.
I've talked about this whole concept in depth with various people. Being a good gun owning American, I do agree. There are variables to this though. Who is better at long range accurate shooting and ammunition conservation?
1) A thug from a metro area, has killed several people in drug/gang violence, but hasn't yet been caught.
2) A mafia "enforcer".
3) A good ol' country hick, who is 3rd generation on his families 100 acre farm.
All good sterotypes implied.
While I'd like #1 or #2 on my side for any sort of urban combat, when you get out into rural farmland, #3 is likely to be the clear winner. Most city dwellers didn't grow up shooting squirrels in their back yards. Many may not have even tried to move around silently in the woods. Most have no practice with hunting, tracking, and/or trapping. They can find their target in the city through social connections, and adjust their standard of living dramatically (think bloody and painful).
There's always dumb luck too, so the result can't be guaranteed. I would be #4 on the list, and unless I have a personal interest in any side, since we'd all be fighting over the same resources, I'd stay out of their way until they were done.
That doesn't always work so well.
If you're directly connected to the provider (like you have a cat5 or fiber connect going to your switch), they frequently cache the MAC address on their switch. Providers I've played this with usually have a 4 hour expiration. You can move the virtual IP, but you'll be waiting 4 hours before it actually hits the new server.
In a more moderate world, sure, moving a virtual IP works fine. :)
You should be careful what you submit. You asked about 1,000 users, you got answers for 1,000 users.
I just posted a brief overview of what it takes to handle millions a day. There may be a lot of theorists and wannabe's on here, but I've actually lived it (for years at that).
You can contact me directly through my web site (linked in my profile). A little advice is free. :) I'm more than happy to share what I know.
You have 600 customers that pay on average $5,000,000 . What the hell are you selling?
Ya, at $5 million/customer, you can afford to give them all kinds of warm fuzzy goodness. Hell, you could have a GigE line from every Tier 1 provider, and huge beautiful server farms, AND refresh it every quarter. :)
I'd love to just sit in the accounts receivable office to hear the phone calls. "This months bill is due, that will be $415,000. Would you like to make that payment over the phone."
I suppose budget meetings are a bit easier there.
"I need a million dollars for new switches." :) :)
"Ok. We'll slate that as 1 million 5, just in case you go over"
"Well, I was looking at some new 16 core servers. Loaded they'll be in the ballpark of $20k"
"Sure, get 10 and let us know how they work. You can just pull that out of petty cash."
For the rest of us in the real world, we don't get those luxuries.
With my news site, when we first showed up on the front of Google News, it killed us. We went from a few hundred viewers a day to several thousand a minute.
Limited caching was our best cure. It caches dynamic content for unvalidated users (like, not logged in) for 3 seconds. It doesn't sound like a lot (because it isn't), but the front page may take about 5 hits to the database. At 10,000 users per minute, that's 500 in 3 seconds, or 2500 queries. The 3 seconds number is adjustable too. Would anyone notice if I changed it to 10 or even 30? Nope. I'd notice based on server and database performance though. Why beat up on the database if I don't need to. :)
With the caching on, the only thing that hits frequently is the counter that keeps track of the number of times a story is read. One update versus several larger queries is much easier.
Have you actually worked with DRBD? It's neat once it works, but when it fails, it's messy. I knew someone who had a perfectly good working environment until it flipped out one day. The two DRBD servers fell out of sync. One stayed down, one stayed up, which was expected. One day, the one that had been down for months came up as master, and the other died. Suddenly they're using a database that's months old, *AND* DRBD brought the other one in sync. Everything that had happened for months suddenly disappeared.
I would have blamed user intervention, except no users touched anything. It's hackish at best, and catastrophic at worst. In testing, I failed a pair quite a few times. In the first dozen or so failures it handled fine. Then it didn't. What do you do when both nodes don't want to play? Well, you're dead in the water until you can convince at least one to play nice again.
I started giggling when I saw the "1000 per day" number. Wheee! If he can't get an old server to handle that, he's doing it wrong.
For fun, ya, two servers kept in sync with rsync, would be fine. Maybe three? Sure, why not, the company has money to burn. Oh wait, it's a non-profit.
My old shop was geared up for several thousand users simultaniously. It's uniques were around 4 million/day on a very slow day, and over 10 million per day on a good day. That was basically what I just said above, except with more servers and a better rsync method. That site, because of it's size, was broken down into 3 pieces (3 hostnames). All of the site content for all the sites were replicated (rsync) across about 15 to 25 servers. 15 servers were put in DNS (DNS RR) for each site, and then they were balanced by giving more robust machines multiple A records, and less robust machines fewer. Because it was always growing, we always had some older hardware that we hadn't retired yet, with the newer better stuff. They could be simply categorized as level 1, 2, or 3. The level would equate to the number of A records it had in DNS, and the amount of load it could take (1x load, 2x load, or 3x load).
When a server took a poop, or a datacenter disappeared (it happens, even with 99.999% uptime guarantees), we just saw traffic jump up on the other servers, and of course we'd get a page letting us know something died.
It wasn't fancy, but it wasn't expensive, and was easy to maintain. Want to add a server? Bring up a bare machine. Sync it up. When it's done syncing, and added to the normal sync cycle, add it's IP into DNS. Want to bring a server down? Take it out of DNS. Most users went away within 5 minutes (short ttl). Some stragglers would go away within the hour. So, yank the machine out after an hour to be safe. But, if a machine died, well, it was safe to yank immediately. :)
We usually sat at under 50% utilization, but sometimes I'd test to see what individual machines could take. Give them extra A records, and drop some others off. Is our total utilization still the same? Yes, then everything's ok. Oh wow, look, we're at 160Mb/s. This was a while back, and we only had 100Mb/s ports on the switches, but we used TEQL to share two ports.
So, sitting at 40% utilization, when we lost a datacenter (we had at 3), each would jump to a whopping 60% instead. If we lost two (it never happened, but was good theory), we'd have to bring up some of the hot spares because we'd now be at 120%.
It was always fun to test just one datacenter. We had occasional bandwidth problems. Providers would have some problem that they couldn't identify, and saying "hey, we're having problems going over 600Mb/s on that GigE circuit" usually came back with blank stares. So, I'd shunt a whole bunch of traffic over to it with them on the phone. They'd usually say "Stop it! You're causing problems with the other customers in that DC!" :) It made getting problems fixed a little easier when you can do that.
But, back to TFA .... 2 servers are fine. If it has a DB back end, a good DB server, and maybe a replicated spare would be good, so he *could* be looking at 4. He could safely get away with just one though.
Oh, and all of my stuff was Linux, with regular Cisco Catalyst stitches (like 3500's). Cat5/6 to the machines. GigE fiber to the provider. Don't forget your power managers (APC masterswitch) so you can kick a machine in the middle of the night without going for a drive.