Well you also can use two drives at the same time with raid 1 (mirror), but unlike a stripe will be tougher on writes since a stripe can write twice as fast, while a mirror has to write twice (at the same time).
Raid 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives. Essentially it's in between stripe and mirror. Your capacity is [number of drives] / [number of drives - 1], so you certainly get more capacity. Basically each drive has an ammount of data, and a portion of that drive is reserved for data recovery. So on a raid 5 of 3 drives, you get 2/3 data, 1/3 data recovory stuff. In theory you can then read off of all drives at the same time, but will only have to write to two at the same time no matter how many drives you have.
When it comes down to it, what is more important? The data on the drive, or the speed of it? Usually people want to protect their data and are willing to put up with slightly slower performance. If you lose a drive in a stripe then there is basically no chance of getting it back even if you are willing to pay $10,000 to have some recovery place pull the data. I never really recommend using a stripe for anything (especially considering drive quality now days) but some 'leet gamers and graphic artists are convinced that it's worth the risk for the extra performance.
That depends. I've heard that Ruby is already more popular in Japan than Python. Much of the ports system in FreeBSD (like portupgrade) is written in Ruby. The fact that Ruby is a pretty young language and has already gained so much support tells much of how good it is. While it might not be quite so useful for a resume, it is good for getting results. I know where I work they don't care about the details, they just want results. Right now I write things in perl, but I have the feeling that once perl 6 comes into the mainstream, I'll be moving to Ruby. You don't have to get very far into the language to realize it's very powerful for writing quick scripts, and can scale VERY well. Aside from that it has taint checking which is also a plus - it's certainly worth it just for doing your own tasks if nothing else.
Now, I'm what you'd call a Reagan Democrat. I even voted for Bush (but probably won't a second time--still need to see about Kerry.)
Well it's time for my soapbox. Instead of considering one corrupt politcal party or the OTHER corrupt politcal party, might I suggest looking at other parties? This country is f'ed up because we have one choice or the other and they BOTH suck. People vote for the lesser of two evils instead of actually thinking about voting for someone they believe in. This country is not going to change as long as Republicans and Democrats have control of our system. If you truly believe in a republican or democrat, then vote for them, but if you feel such indifference towards them that you are that indecisive, then look into some alternatives. They may not win the election, but you at least voted for who you wanted to, not because you were herded into voting for a party.
If by "the world" you mean heads of billion dallar corperations pulling the strings on elite politians out of touch with their people. I'm sure the other 99.99999...% had little say in this.
Is there any chance that the pinstripe theme is going to be available for other platforms? Not this "winstripe" thing, I'm talking about exactly what you see on OSX. I use Firefox on Windows,Mac, and Linux and I have to say that I am a BIG fan of pinstripe.
It's sleek, minimalistic, while being quite attractive and intuitive. It's seriously the nicest looking browser there is (yeah, even nicer than safari IMHO). I don't really care what they do with the firefox interface if they would just allow me to theme firefox in pinstripe everywhere.
Funny as this might sound: sourceforge. Generally stuff on sourceforge is trustable due to the fact that... well you can see the source! There are lots of nice apps like MirandaICQ and WinSCP among others. On the other hand most of this stuff tends to be as buggy as the linux gui equivelants.
I have a similar file, but I just use vim. Then use:X to encrypt the file and vim will automatically take care of the rest. It's unfortunate that vim's security isn't very strong, but the file is at least portable and vim runs on everything but the kitchen sink. For really secure stuff I wrote a messy shell script wrapper to use mcrypt at 256bit AES to manage a keychain file.
Of course the temp files are always unencrypted but you can't win all the time =/
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Who is going to pay for the hardware then? Microsoft? Sun? What happens when I don't want the crap video card they gave me? What happens when I want to upgrade my video card? Who am I going to call for support when something dies? That would imply that either I call Microsoft (thus adding yet ANOTHER layer for tech support headaches) or that Microsoft decides who is the master computer distributor. If hardware was really free, there would be a monumental ammount of headaches added to computing.
What it comes down to is this - both of these companies want subscription based models, but for different reasons. Sun is currently being marginalized on all sides. One thing Sun can do well, is integrate a server / client system - subscrption model works well here.
Microsoft on the other hand has different problems but wants the same result. As hardware gets cheaper and cheaper, its getting harder and harder to hide the cost of windows - and sooner or later people are going to realize that a significant percentage of their computer cost is the OS. Aside from that MS is facing problems with the their software becomming a commodity - with subscription you are garanteed a steady revenue flow, and costs easily fade into the background (think MCI phone bill).
More importantly to what you stated, when you run a total DRM enabled (operating) system, will it really matter if you own the hardware or not?
Actually this doesn't surprise me at all. I know a guy who used to work for a major ISP in the Northeast. Their company would fight tooth and nail to get into schools because of the funding they could get. They would offer to get the school wired, and would offer to do the rather complex paperwork to get grants from the state (or maybe federal, I can't recall). They then would wire schools with rather pricey equipment. Not obscenely out of line equipment, but certainly more expensive than needed. From what I understand, everyone is so concerned about getting schools wired so kids can surf the net instead of learning, that no one is looking at the price tag.
I thought it was 2x RAM. Which brings up the point, if I have say 3 Gigs of RAM, do I really NEED 6 Gigs of swap? Hell look at how long it wout take to read 6 Gigs off the hard drive. I agree with the article that swap is probably still neccesary, but perhaps the rule of thumb needs to be adjusted according to usage and needs. Personally I never go over 512M of swap no matter how much RAM I have, but I'm not a kernel hacker either and I have yet to see a good answer concerning when I can make due with a more RAM than swap.
I think there is one major difference that I can think of off of the top of my head. Look at what the older generations were listening to during the 60-70s (even mid 80s). There were artists for the kids, artists for teens, artists who make music for the parents generation, and probably even the grandparents generation.
Nowdays there is only one market - the market for teenagers, the MTV stuff. Where is the music for people over 30? There isn't any new music for them, they have to essentially lisen to the music they liked from years past. I agree that music has always sucked, but it looks to me like more and more that the music industry is trying to narrow the bell curve of what is most popular and sells, and it's causing people to drop off the ends at a higher rate then ever before. They market to only ONE segment of the population and then wonder why music sales go down.
The author also went through the trouble of writing about and taking a screenshot of a rare bug during install that I have never actually seen in all the time I have been using and installing FreeBSD.
If your talking about the disk geometry thing, I've seen that many times, although never on a drive less than 40Gb. The advice it (the installer) gives you is probably a good thing to note anyway - Look what the geometry is supposed to be on the hard drive, and look at what the bios says it is (use the bios settings). I've had other obscure problems with FreeBSD as well, such as the system not booting if I had two 80Gb hard drives connected at the same time - I seriously don't know what that problem was, but 5.x handled it fine. Simply put, if you know what you are doing, it's about as hard to install as anything else.
What is exactly the value of the damage. Is it the time lost, productivity lost, data lost? We see values like 5 billion dollars assigned to damage done by a virus, but who comes up with those figures and decides what is worth what?
And how about this: Why do we talk about executing virus writers, but don't talk about executing say - crooked polititans who ruin our country, or CEO's who destroy companies through their own incompetance/bad judgement.
That depends. This is talking about data encryption which as far as I know Postgresql doesn't do either. Postgresql does do SSL connection encryption and can use MD5 hashes for passwords, so if your server is secure, and your passwords are as well, then your data should be secure. The thing to be concerned about is "the company is writing complex encryption and decryption functionality directly into the product ". That's great and all, but who exactly is going to vouch for Microsoft correctly implementing this complex encryption? Are we going to have to take MS's word that it's secure because they told us so? Is it going to be possible for non MS (open source) stuff to connect to an MS SQL database with this stuff turned on?
As far as I've ever heard, there really weren't any military targets in Dresden. The bombing there was to obliterate the city and demoralize the German people, just as Hitler tried to do the same with London. I think there is validity for most people in the Geneva Convention, but if anyone is going to talk about "morality" in war, you might as well completely skip WWII because everyone pretty much blatantly ignored all the "rules".
People tend to get on their high horse when talking about what's right and wrong in war (especially when they've never been in one) and tend to gloss over the fact that this is people fighting for their lives here. According to the Geneva convention you're not supposed to use a 50-caliber machine gun on personell. Yeah, if I have no guns and there's a 50cal beside me I'm sure as hell going to shoot back. In the end if you want to avoid atrocities in war, then don't get in one in the first place.
Sounds like IBM's ROI could be higher if their marketing were smarter.
That depends on how you look at it. This is more like phase 1. IBM isn't neccesarily selling IBM, they're trying to get mindshare. How do you sell something if people don't know what it is. You have to get the word on the street and generate talk before you can come in with your solutions. Basically you aren't going to sell much of ANYTHING relating to Linux if people don't even know what Linux is. IBM seems to be the only real player that has stepped up to the plate to push Linux as a concept/philosophy, as opposed to the half hearted attempts by HP, and virtually nil by Dell. IBM might not sell as much now, but I think the community will remember who is really serious about Linux before it was a buzz word.
In my opinion IBM is positioning itself in a really good spot. Dell is essentially only a hardware vendor and tied to Microsoft, while HP seems to be struggling with direction. If/when Linux hits big, you're going to have tons of tools and open systems, and a need to tie it all together.
There is also a problem there. Is there any way to defrag a drive other than just removing and recopying the information? I ran into a problem where a ext3 partition ended up fragmented to hell and couldn't find any tools to defragment the drive. The fact that 99% of us using ext2/3 and ufs never really need to defrag is a good thing, but not having any tools available when you need them isn't neccesarily good either.
Although this was modded as funny, I have to agree that the type of place you work at can make a difference with the perks. I work at a uniform service place and they give me stuff to wear, clean it and press it. Break a button, they fix it. Tear a shirt, they replace it. The ammount of time and money this saves me is worth a lot in my opinion. I also get an unending supply of nice barmops to clean computers off with at work, and free rags for home use =P
I am however glad that I don't work at Krispy Kreme as I imagine their IT turnover goes quite high with staff falling over dead from heart attacks and such.
Some things I thought of immediately reading this, great - two displays each driven by a separate card
Am I missing something here, because I just set up two video cards up on my machine the other day. Now it's relativly easy to set up a dual display on a dual headed card, but using two cards takes a bit more work, especially if you have two completely different monitors that run different resolutions and refresh rates. Now I use an AGP and PCI card, but I imagine it's the same difference with PCI Express.
So I'm assuming that they're talking about using the power of another GPU to help processing, because there isn't anything really new about using two graphics cards.
Holy crap, that has to be the most long drawn out boring explanation of rm -rf ~ I've ever read. I think this guy might have been one of my college professors. I imagine his explanation of DELTREE/Y C:\WINDOWS would put people into a coma.
Slashdot Mirror
Well you also can use two drives at the same time with raid 1 (mirror), but unlike a stripe will be tougher on writes since a stripe can write twice as fast, while a mirror has to write twice (at the same time).
Raid 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives. Essentially it's in between stripe and mirror. Your capacity is [number of drives] / [number of drives - 1], so you certainly get more capacity. Basically each drive has an ammount of data, and a portion of that drive is reserved for data recovery. So on a raid 5 of 3 drives, you get 2/3 data, 1/3 data recovory stuff. In theory you can then read off of all drives at the same time, but will only have to write to two at the same time no matter how many drives you have.
When it comes down to it, what is more important? The data on the drive, or the speed of it? Usually people want to protect their data and are willing to put up with slightly slower performance. If you lose a drive in a stripe then there is basically no chance of getting it back even if you are willing to pay $10,000 to have some recovery place pull the data. I never really recommend using a stripe for anything (especially considering drive quality now days) but some 'leet gamers and graphic artists are convinced that it's worth the risk for the extra performance.
Wait, we were supposed to patch SSH on Fridays? I thought it was OpenSSL. Oh crap, all my servers are wide open! Noooo! ... <no carrier>
That depends. I've heard that Ruby is already more popular in Japan than Python. Much of the ports system in FreeBSD (like portupgrade) is written in Ruby. The fact that Ruby is a pretty young language and has already gained so much support tells much of how good it is. While it might not be quite so useful for a resume, it is good for getting results. I know where I work they don't care about the details, they just want results. Right now I write things in perl, but I have the feeling that once perl 6 comes into the mainstream, I'll be moving to Ruby. You don't have to get very far into the language to realize it's very powerful for writing quick scripts, and can scale VERY well. Aside from that it has taint checking which is also a plus - it's certainly worth it just for doing your own tasks if nothing else.
Now, I'm what you'd call a Reagan Democrat. I even voted for Bush (but probably won't a second time--still need to see about Kerry.)
Well it's time for my soapbox. Instead of considering one corrupt politcal party or the OTHER corrupt politcal party, might I suggest looking at other parties? This country is f'ed up because we have one choice or the other and they BOTH suck. People vote for the lesser of two evils instead of actually thinking about voting for someone they believe in. This country is not going to change as long as Republicans and Democrats have control of our system. If you truly believe in a republican or democrat, then vote for them, but if you feel such indifference towards them that you are that indecisive, then look into some alternatives. They may not win the election, but you at least voted for who you wanted to, not because you were herded into voting for a party.
If by "the world" you mean heads of billion dallar corperations pulling the strings on elite politians out of touch with their people. I'm sure the other 99.99999...% had little say in this.
Is there any chance that the pinstripe theme is going to be available for other platforms? Not this "winstripe" thing, I'm talking about exactly what you see on OSX. I use Firefox on Windows,Mac, and Linux and I have to say that I am a BIG fan of pinstripe.
It's sleek, minimalistic, while being quite attractive and intuitive. It's seriously the nicest looking browser there is (yeah, even nicer than safari IMHO). I don't really care what they do with the firefox interface if they would just allow me to theme firefox in pinstripe everywhere.
Funny as this might sound: sourceforge. Generally stuff on sourceforge is trustable due to the fact that... well you can see the source! There are lots of nice apps like MirandaICQ and WinSCP among others. On the other hand most of this stuff tends to be as buggy as the linux gui equivelants.
I have a similar file, but I just use vim. Then use :X to encrypt the file and vim will automatically take care of the rest. It's unfortunate that vim's security isn't very strong, but the file is at least portable and vim runs on everything but the kitchen sink. For really secure stuff I wrote a messy shell script wrapper to use mcrypt at 256bit AES to manage a keychain file.
Of course the temp files are always unencrypted but you can't win all the time =/
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Who is going to pay for the hardware then? Microsoft? Sun? What happens when I don't want the crap video card they gave me? What happens when I want to upgrade my video card? Who am I going to call for support when something dies? That would imply that either I call Microsoft (thus adding yet ANOTHER layer for tech support headaches) or that Microsoft decides who is the master computer distributor. If hardware was really free, there would be a monumental ammount of headaches added to computing.
What it comes down to is this - both of these companies want subscription based models, but for different reasons. Sun is currently being marginalized on all sides. One thing Sun can do well, is integrate a server / client system - subscrption model works well here.
Microsoft on the other hand has different problems but wants the same result. As hardware gets cheaper and cheaper, its getting harder and harder to hide the cost of windows - and sooner or later people are going to realize that a significant percentage of their computer cost is the OS. Aside from that MS is facing problems with the their software becomming a commodity - with subscription you are garanteed a steady revenue flow, and costs easily fade into the background (think MCI phone bill).
More importantly to what you stated, when you run a total DRM enabled (operating) system, will it really matter if you own the hardware or not?
Actually this doesn't surprise me at all. I know a guy who used to work for a major ISP in the Northeast. Their company would fight tooth and nail to get into schools because of the funding they could get. They would offer to get the school wired, and would offer to do the rather complex paperwork to get grants from the state (or maybe federal, I can't recall). They then would wire schools with rather pricey equipment. Not obscenely out of line equipment, but certainly more expensive than needed. From what I understand, everyone is so concerned about getting schools wired so kids can surf the net instead of learning, that no one is looking at the price tag.
I thought it was 2x RAM. Which brings up the point, if I have say 3 Gigs of RAM, do I really NEED 6 Gigs of swap? Hell look at how long it wout take to read 6 Gigs off the hard drive. I agree with the article that swap is probably still neccesary, but perhaps the rule of thumb needs to be adjusted according to usage and needs. Personally I never go over 512M of swap no matter how much RAM I have, but I'm not a kernel hacker either and I have yet to see a good answer concerning when I can make due with a more RAM than swap.
I think there is one major difference that I can think of off of the top of my head. Look at what the older generations were listening to during the 60-70s (even mid 80s). There were artists for the kids, artists for teens, artists who make music for the parents generation, and probably even the grandparents generation.
Nowdays there is only one market - the market for teenagers, the MTV stuff. Where is the music for people over 30? There isn't any new music for them, they have to essentially lisen to the music they liked from years past. I agree that music has always sucked, but it looks to me like more and more that the music industry is trying to narrow the bell curve of what is most popular and sells, and it's causing people to drop off the ends at a higher rate then ever before. They market to only ONE segment of the population and then wonder why music sales go down.
Does that make the admin a necromancer?
There's a reason to use it all in itself!
The author also went through the trouble of writing about and taking a screenshot of a rare bug during install that I have never actually seen in all the time I have been using and installing FreeBSD.
If your talking about the disk geometry thing, I've seen that many times, although never on a drive less than 40Gb. The advice it (the installer) gives you is probably a good thing to note anyway - Look what the geometry is supposed to be on the hard drive, and look at what the bios says it is (use the bios settings). I've had other obscure problems with FreeBSD as well, such as the system not booting if I had two 80Gb hard drives connected at the same time - I seriously don't know what that problem was, but 5.x handled it fine.
Simply put, if you know what you are doing, it's about as hard to install as anything else.
What is exactly the value of the damage. Is it the time lost, productivity lost, data lost? We see values like 5 billion dollars assigned to damage done by a virus, but who comes up with those figures and decides what is worth what?
And how about this: Why do we talk about executing virus writers, but don't talk about executing say - crooked polititans who ruin our country, or CEO's who destroy companies through their own incompetance/bad judgement.
That depends. This is talking about data encryption which as far as I know Postgresql doesn't do either. Postgresql does do SSL connection encryption and can use MD5 hashes for passwords, so if your server is secure, and your passwords are as well, then your data should be secure. The thing to be concerned about is "the company is writing complex encryption and decryption functionality directly into the product ". That's great and all, but who exactly is going to vouch for Microsoft correctly implementing this complex encryption? Are we going to have to take MS's word that it's secure because they told us so? Is it going to be possible for non MS (open source) stuff to connect to an MS SQL database with this stuff turned on?
Software is like sex - you screw up once and end up supporting it for the rest of your life.
As far as I've ever heard, there really weren't any military targets in Dresden. The bombing there was to obliterate the city and demoralize the German people, just as Hitler tried to do the same with London. I think there is validity for most people in the Geneva Convention, but if anyone is going to talk about "morality" in war, you might as well completely skip WWII because everyone pretty much blatantly ignored all the "rules".
People tend to get on their high horse when talking about what's right and wrong in war (especially when they've never been in one) and tend to gloss over the fact that this is people fighting for their lives here. According to the Geneva convention you're not supposed to use a 50-caliber machine gun on personell. Yeah, if I have no guns and there's a 50cal beside me I'm sure as hell going to shoot back. In the end if you want to avoid atrocities in war, then don't get in one in the first place.
Sounds like IBM's ROI could be higher if their marketing were smarter.
That depends on how you look at it. This is more like phase 1. IBM isn't neccesarily selling IBM, they're trying to get mindshare. How do you sell something if people don't know what it is. You have to get the word on the street and generate talk before you can come in with your solutions. Basically you aren't going to sell much of ANYTHING relating to Linux if people don't even know what Linux is. IBM seems to be the only real player that has stepped up to the plate to push Linux as a concept/philosophy, as opposed to the half hearted attempts by HP, and virtually nil by Dell. IBM might not sell as much now, but I think the community will remember who is really serious about Linux before it was a buzz word.
In my opinion IBM is positioning itself in a really good spot. Dell is essentially only a hardware vendor and tied to Microsoft, while HP seems to be struggling with direction. If/when Linux hits big, you're going to have tons of tools and open systems, and a need to tie it all together.
There is also a problem there. Is there any way to defrag a drive other than just removing and recopying the information? I ran into a problem where a ext3 partition ended up fragmented to hell and couldn't find any tools to defragment the drive. The fact that 99% of us using ext2/3 and ufs never really need to defrag is a good thing, but not having any tools available when you need them isn't neccesarily good either.
Although this was modded as funny, I have to agree that the type of place you work at can make a difference with the perks. I work at a uniform service place and they give me stuff to wear, clean it and press it. Break a button, they fix it. Tear a shirt, they replace it. The ammount of time and money this saves me is worth a lot in my opinion. I also get an unending supply of nice barmops to clean computers off with at work, and free rags for home use =P
I am however glad that I don't work at Krispy Kreme as I imagine their IT turnover goes quite high with staff falling over dead from heart attacks and such.
shouldn't that be
#!/bin/sh
while [ 1 ]
do
wget -r http://slashdot.org
sleep 500
done
You'd probably regret it after the first crack whore with 20 other bad STDs - which may have no cure =P
Some things I thought of immediately reading this, great - two displays each driven by a separate card
Am I missing something here, because I just set up two video cards up on my machine the other day. Now it's relativly easy to set up a dual display on a dual headed card, but using two cards takes a bit more work, especially if you have two completely different monitors that run different resolutions and refresh rates. Now I use an AGP and PCI card, but I imagine it's the same difference with PCI Express.
So I'm assuming that they're talking about using the power of another GPU to help processing, because there isn't anything really new about using two graphics cards.
Holy crap, that has to be the most long drawn out boring explanation of rm -rf ~ I've ever read. I think this guy might have been one of my college professors. I imagine his explanation of DELTREE /Y C:\WINDOWS would put people into a coma.