I have a surface book. The one with the gpu in the keyboard. Cost almost $3k. The keyboard stopped detaching about two months after warranty expired. I had to pay $600 to have it fixed. I like the regular surface devices, but would not buy another surface book.
Ubuntu has a very controlled release methodology -
LTS (Long Term Support) releases like 8.04LTS and 10.04LTS which are stable, and supported and suitable for the enterprise or servers for 5 years. The other releases, are committed to advancing features and functions, and are generally pretty stable, but they will yank something out form time to time. Just pick the right version, and you're good to go.
I'm only familiar enough with netapp out of the nas/san vendors to feel like I can speak authoritatively, but netapp has a feature to audit cifs (windows file sharing) access/modification. Throw "cifs file auditing" into google and you'll get some results. This will only really give you auditing at the first level of access, if someone accesses it legitimately and then passes it on you're out of luck, but you'll have a list of who accessed the initial file at least, which may be enough.
Anyway, YMMV, but if you've already got netapp or some other storage vendor, it might be worth looking into.
College isn't cheap - and in most cases certainly isn't free (even if it is, someone's paying) - so why the heck are you turning to slashdot when you've got someone who teaches the course you could ask. If they're too busy to field the question then you should be yelling at someone about not getting your money's worth.
I would much rather there were an easily accessible forum where people who wanted to post pictures of naked children would go... seems like that would make it a heck of a lot easier to track them down. Now they're probably spread out over five thousand underground websites and it'll be twice as hard to catch them. Dammit. I shouldn't have said "twice as hard". Ick.
So, a while back - 2001 according to whois, I registered my personal domain at a small webhost. It was my personal domain, and, as such, not something I was to concerned, where reliability was concerned. Anyway, I picked this place off an ad on kuro5hin (heh, remember them?) and did so based *only* on price. It turned out it was running by one guy. Over the years we exchanged a number of emails and got to know each other by name. Now, I address my support emails directly to him, and I know they're not going to screw with my stuff.
So my advice is this: If you're going to use a webhost, use somewhere small, and take the time to get to know the admins. They'll value you a lot more than some huge conglomerate.
As for legality, look to the terms of use. If they offered you virtual private hosting, well, there's an assumption of privacy. Otherwise, look at that "terms of service" document you most likely clicked right though.
And to give the a quick plug (I neither work there, nor have a financial relationship outside of paying) http://ion-web.com/ is pretty good. Feel free to tell them Nick Bernstein recommended them, maybe they give me an even better deal.
Imagine this, you've to two videos on your site and each one makes you $10,000 per day, and another site, each video makes you $1, but you've got 100,000,000 of them... which site would you rather own?
One of the advantages of youtube is it delivers media with advertising that people largely stomach. The whole idea is silly. People need to stop worrying about maximizing profit -- instead, they should concentrate on developing a sustainable profit.
If you, as you say you are, disgusted with the actions of the MPAA, then why not take this opportunity to exemplify freedom of speech and the right to free assembly with a respectful organized protest. Engage the social studies teachers and ask them to put the idea out in their classes. Many of the students are probably upset by the MPAA's actions as well, and it seems like a good opportunity to foster activism, one of the core values of a healthy democratic citizenship. You could even write up pamphlets which look like the early American pamphleteers, and maybe involve some of the art classes, to help you age and weather the paper.
I would discuss this with the school administration, however as it at least polite to inform them that you are going to be doing something of this nature. Characterizing it as the above: a way to connect with the students about an issue they care about and foster activism may make it more acceptable to the administration as it demonstrates a clear educational agenda.
This isn't really in response to any one comment, but more or less the general "Americans Don't Give a Shit" genre of comments that appear on this story. I've been thinking about the general sense of apathy and while I think a lot of them have been discussed inside and out (corruption, money in politics, biased media, lack of political options) one I've been thinking about lately is the lack of communities:
1. US College System & Culture encourages people to move and "get away" from their families, friends, and the "village" of people they grew up with and around. While I'm not that old, at 28, even with this short amount of time, very few people I've kept in touch with from highschool live "back home". You develop friends who are in your income bracket, who have similar interests, and usually similar thoughts politically. It's much easier not to care about the minimum wage if you're not affected by it.
2. Mass Media: TV is the "Bread and circus" of the day. I'll admit it - most of the time I come home after work, flop down on the couch and watch TV. I'm not sitting on my porch and seeing my neighbors when they walk by. It's in the entertainment industry's intrest to try and keep us there by making us numb to everything else by constantly bombarding us with sex, violence and danger. And, lets face it, it's interesting. There's a lot of good entertainment there. Judgment on the medium aside, it keeps us inside with little community interation.
3. Cars: The US is a car society. People do not walk, with an exception of a few cities. If you drive 30 minutes to work instead of working near where you live, you don't meet people in your neighborhood. There are some exceptions: church and school for example. But look at those two communities and how active they are pollitically. They're brought together by a common purpose, but I bet if you did a survey of people who attend church or have children in school they'd be more politically active than the average.
There are a lot of other things that contribute, and I'm not even suggesting that this is the primary factor, but I don't see it discussed and thought I would put it out there.
Or you could, you know, run for office, or actively try to elect someone who's opinions you agree with and work on their campaign so they might listen to your opinion. God forbid you put effort into a democracy.
If you know it, yes that would be illegal as it would be withholding evidence. However, as The Attorney General of the United States has shown, it's soooo hard to remember things these days.
Caveat: I don't know anyone with full blown autism or have much experience with anyone like that. I do, however, know a large number of people with asperger syndrome, which is often considered the low end of the autism spectrum. People with autism often have amazing abilities. They have social problems, to be sure, but if we offer people the ability to prevent/cure autism, then it will be difficult to do any research on the subject, and honestly, what's more important than how to improve the capacity of the human mind?
So if your datacenter is like a lot of datacenters, you probably have a bunch of servers. Servers tend to try and be redundant. i.e two mirrored hard drives, two power supplies, second machine to fail over to. What if, instead, you hosted on virtual machines & cut down on the number of hot-failover components, and machines. You could have a smaller number of servers functioning as failovers, and you could replace parts as needed without their using up additional power....
First off, the United states has MASSIVE Debt right now. Diebold, secure or not, is HUGELY overcharging. There are perfectly good alternatives which are OSS & Free. Now - I like open source, but I have no problem with commercial software. Hell I work at Microsoft. Voting systems are one place where the code should be open. This is one system that should be maintained by the public & the government and not a penny should be exchanged for it.
Now, I'm all for people making a living at developing commercial software. Diebold has smart people and they can figure something out to make a buck. Heck, as far as I'm concerned, if they can meet some standards they could sell the hardware. But - the US Debt per person is $28k each. Isn't there other things that we could be using the money we're spending on voting machines on? Here's some that I can think of:
I remember when webpages first started cropping up. I'm not even talking graphics. I was using links or whatever text based web browser was there at the time, as I only had a shell account. It sucked me in. All of these different "sites" I could go to, files to download, things to play with - it was great. Recently A friend told me about secondlife, which, for all intents and purposes is a metaverse not a distributed one, but whatever. I tried it out, and was bored off my ass. There's no "wow" there. Without a "wow" factor, it's pretty useless. Also, it's more difficult to interact w/ computerlike things there. I don't want to have to use a monitor in my monitor. Sure, yes, you could switch back and forth, but if you're doing that you're taking the features out of the metaverse. I dunno. If it succedes there are going to be several in between steps, I think.
OK, so as a number of users have said, this isn't very interesting if it's a home directory. Other users have, correctly imo stated that this becomes much more interesting if the directory contains the information they authenticate against. I think this is true, but what if taken one step further -
1. ipod phone will almost certainly have a camera - how nice would it be if you could "automatically" log in with a quick iris scan?
2. what if the device autmated "synced" snapshot backups? If the ipod only synced at the end of your session when you were going to logg out, it would autmatically have a "last good" snapshot. Since this is unlikely, what if you could choose to restore instead of update one of the computers your data was on.
3. I think the idea of keeping a journal off disk is pretty interesting too. Got a virus? Lets check the read-only file checksum to see if it changed? It did? lets restore it from the good copy.
I'll tell you though - as much as I like my ipod, I really wish my smartphone could do all this. I carry it with me everywhere, it's got the potential, but the crappy software & drm makes it abysmal to use for anything but phone/web/email. Doing anything interesting is pretty much out.
I've never understood this argument. I was never under the impression that most OSS project's goal was to "run in the enterprise" or "succede in a business environment" -- I'm sure there are a few, but not the majority. I think the majority of projects have a goal like "make the best free unix OS" or "make the best IDE" or "Make the best web server" if they get succede, or get close then enterprise shops will consider them. There may be licenese and support issues which are separate, but I'd be surprised if I saw that goal on a OSS project website. That's a business goal more appropriate to Microsoft, Redhat, or IBM.
If not having google/yahoo/msn search in china would in any way stop the filtering from happening, I would argue that they should not take any part in it. However, it won't. There are a lot of smart computer scientists in china, and iirc lycos may have even been bought be a chinese company (don't quote me on that). All it means is that US companies would miss out an a huge opportunity to take advantage of an area where US technology is ahead of the compitition, or at least running with the absolute forefront. With all the problems that US technology has, why in gods name would we put up another barrier?
First off, on the surface, sure, it is a bad idea- but it already exists. If you are under a certain limit of internet use, you pay for dialup. If you are moderate/normal you buy broadband. If you have excessive needs, you start to look at "business class" solutions which can go all the way up to big bonded OC-XXX and fiber. What they're really talking about it standardizing cutting up the midrange portion, and here's the thing - with the advent of wireless networking, and the enormous improvment on computer resources in therms of memory, processing power, storage, etc, and the fact that mainstream internet providers don't use ipv6 - do you really think people woudln't start putting up beacons on their wireless routers and running some kind of dynamic routing protocol like bgp/ebgp/ospf if the prices/annoyance factor got too high? Calling up comcast and having them send someone to the house and "install your internet" is pretty nice and all, but if it became a huge hassle, or overly expensive, how long do you think that would last? We used to run bbs's that would connect to each other and transmit email from one end of the country to the other over 9600bps modems... do you really think we couldn't put together a gurillanet? I mean, damn folks - ip includes a 'broadcast address' for a reason.
Uhm, have you looked around to see how much it costs to get your web/mail/databases hosted? It's cheap as hell. I started at 2.95/month a few years ago, and now I pay a whopping $9/month. Maybe I'm just insane, but I would *never* consider hosting my stuff at an employer's work, even if they were OK with it and I had no plans of leaving ever. It's just shady. What if your php script that you just threw together playing around and that didn't go through QA had a hole in it and your server got compromized... or whatever.
In many ways privacy does protect that, and in a sense that's one of america's founding principals, that citizens reserve the right to become "terrorists" if the government gets out of hand. To the British, the american "rebels" were terrorists. This is the thing that scares me most about terrorism, it's persicuting an "idea" not a crime. The people who crashed a plane into the towers were MURDERERS -- who cares what their motivation is. It's like "hate crimes" - is it any worse to kill a random stranger than it is to kill someone because they're a certain race that you hate?
Also, if the government had just cause to think that those two friends were plotting to crash a plane into a building, then they should go to a court, state for the record what they think, and why, and with a judge's permission tap the phone for a certain amount of time. If it turns out they were wrong, they should tell the person and destroy all evidence. They shouldn't be able to get a secret warrant and never disclose what/why the did to anyone.
The whole idea is that there's supposed to be a balance. The balance is getting out of whack.
that's/mostly/ true, but since hard drives are magnetic, each time you flip a bit (1->0 or 0->1) you loose a *tiiiiny* bit of magnatism. If you have the proper equiptment you can still recover data from a "zeroed" hard drive. It used to be the US government agencies would require a disk be randomly zero'd 5 times before it could be discarded. Now they probably melt them.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a surface book. The one with the gpu in the keyboard. Cost almost $3k. The keyboard stopped detaching about two months after warranty expired. I had to pay $600 to have it fixed. I like the regular surface devices, but would not buy another surface book.
Ubuntu has a very controlled release methodology -
LTS (Long Term Support) releases like 8.04LTS and 10.04LTS which are stable, and supported and suitable for the enterprise or servers for 5 years.
The other releases, are committed to advancing features and functions, and are generally pretty stable, but they will yank something out form time to time. Just pick the right version, and you're good to go.
I'm only familiar enough with netapp out of the nas/san vendors to feel like I can speak authoritatively, but netapp has a feature to audit cifs (windows file sharing) access/modification. Throw "cifs file auditing" into google and you'll get some results. This will only really give you auditing at the first level of access, if someone accesses it legitimately and then passes it on you're out of luck, but you'll have a list of who accessed the initial file at least, which may be enough.
Anyway, YMMV, but if you've already got netapp or some other storage vendor, it might be worth looking into.
College isn't cheap - and in most cases certainly isn't free (even if it is, someone's paying) - so why the heck are you turning to slashdot when you've got someone who teaches the course you could ask. If they're too busy to field the question then you should be yelling at someone about not getting your money's worth.
Just my 2Â,
Nick
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but the idea of buying music without in some way being able to damage the environment has been KILLING me.
Way to get on that EMI. Thank god!
I would much rather there were an easily accessible forum where people who wanted to post pictures of naked children would go... seems like that would make it a heck of a lot easier to track them down. Now they're probably spread out over five thousand underground websites and it'll be twice as hard to catch them. Dammit. I shouldn't have said "twice as hard". Ick.
So, a while back - 2001 according to whois, I registered my personal domain at a small webhost. It was my personal domain, and, as such, not something I was to concerned, where reliability was concerned. Anyway, I picked this place off an ad on kuro5hin (heh, remember them?) and did so based *only* on price. It turned out it was running by one guy. Over the years we exchanged a number of emails and got to know each other by name. Now, I address my support emails directly to him, and I know they're not going to screw with my stuff.
So my advice is this: If you're going to use a webhost, use somewhere small, and take the time to get to know the admins. They'll value you a lot more than some huge conglomerate.
As for legality, look to the terms of use. If they offered you virtual private hosting, well, there's an assumption of privacy. Otherwise, look at that "terms of service" document you most likely clicked right though.
And to give the a quick plug (I neither work there, nor have a financial relationship outside of paying) http://ion-web.com/ is pretty good. Feel free to tell them Nick Bernstein recommended them, maybe they give me an even better deal.
"Post hoc ergo propter hoc"
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html#posthoc
eg: "The Soviet Union collapsed after instituting state atheism. Therefore we must avoid atheism for the same reasons."
Imagine this, you've to two videos on your site and each one makes you $10,000 per day, and another site, each video makes you $1, but you've got 100,000,000 of them... which site would you rather own?
One of the advantages of youtube is it delivers media with advertising that people largely stomach. The whole idea is silly. People need to stop worrying about maximizing profit -- instead, they should concentrate on developing a sustainable profit.
If you, as you say you are, disgusted with the actions of the MPAA, then why not take this opportunity to exemplify freedom of speech and the right to free assembly with a respectful organized protest. Engage the social studies teachers and ask them to put the idea out in their classes. Many of the students are probably upset by the MPAA's actions as well, and it seems like a good opportunity to foster activism, one of the core values of a healthy democratic citizenship. You could even write up pamphlets which look like the early American pamphleteers, and maybe involve some of the art classes, to help you age and weather the paper.
I would discuss this with the school administration, however as it at least polite to inform them that you are going to be doing something of this nature. Characterizing it as the above: a way to connect with the students about an issue they care about and foster activism may make it more acceptable to the administration as it demonstrates a clear educational agenda.
Best of luck, and let your conscience guide you!
This isn't really in response to any one comment, but more or less the general "Americans Don't Give a Shit" genre of comments that appear on this story. I've been thinking about the general sense of apathy and while I think a lot of them have been discussed inside and out (corruption, money in politics, biased media, lack of political options) one I've been thinking about lately is the lack of communities:
1. US College System & Culture encourages people to move and "get away" from their families, friends, and the "village" of people they grew up with and around. While I'm not that old, at 28, even with this short amount of time, very few people I've kept in touch with from highschool live "back home". You develop friends who are in your income bracket, who have similar interests, and usually similar thoughts politically. It's much easier not to care about the minimum wage if you're not affected by it.
2. Mass Media: TV is the "Bread and circus" of the day. I'll admit it - most of the time I come home after work, flop down on the couch and watch TV. I'm not sitting on my porch and seeing my neighbors when they walk by. It's in the entertainment industry's intrest to try and keep us there by making us numb to everything else by constantly bombarding us with sex, violence and danger. And, lets face it, it's interesting. There's a lot of good entertainment there. Judgment on the medium aside, it keeps us inside with little community interation.
3. Cars: The US is a car society. People do not walk, with an exception of a few cities. If you drive 30 minutes to work instead of working near where you live, you don't meet people in your neighborhood. There are some exceptions: church and school for example. But look at those two communities and how active they are pollitically. They're brought together by a common purpose, but I bet if you did a survey of people who attend church or have children in school they'd be more politically active than the average.
There are a lot of other things that contribute, and I'm not even suggesting that this is the primary factor, but I don't see it discussed and thought I would put it out there.
-nb
Or you could, you know, run for office, or actively try to elect someone who's opinions you agree with and work on their campaign so they might listen to your opinion. God forbid you put effort into a democracy.
If you know it, yes that would be illegal as it would be withholding evidence. However, as The Attorney General of the United States has shown, it's soooo hard to remember things these days.
Caveat: I don't know anyone with full blown autism or have much experience with anyone like that. I do, however, know a large number of people with asperger syndrome, which is often considered the low end of the autism spectrum. People with autism often have amazing abilities. They have social problems, to be sure, but if we offer people the ability to prevent/cure autism, then it will be difficult to do any research on the subject, and honestly, what's more important than how to improve the capacity of the human mind?
So if your datacenter is like a lot of datacenters, you probably have a bunch of servers. Servers tend to try and be redundant. i.e two mirrored hard drives, two power supplies, second machine to fail over to. What if, instead, you hosted on virtual machines & cut down on the number of hot-failover components, and machines. You could have a smaller number of servers functioning as failovers, and you could replace parts as needed without their using up additional power....
just a thought.
Now, I'm all for people making a living at developing commercial software. Diebold has smart people and they can figure something out to make a buck. Heck, as far as I'm concerned, if they can meet some standards they could sell the hardware. But - the US Debt per person is $28k each. Isn't there other things that we could be using the money we're spending on voting machines on? Here's some that I can think of:
Anyway, just $0.02
-n
I remember when webpages first started cropping up. I'm not even talking graphics. I was using links or whatever text based web browser was there at the time, as I only had a shell account. It sucked me in. All of these different "sites" I could go to, files to download, things to play with - it was great. Recently A friend told me about secondlife, which, for all intents and purposes is a metaverse not a distributed one, but whatever. I tried it out, and was bored off my ass. There's no "wow" there. Without a "wow" factor, it's pretty useless. Also, it's more difficult to interact w/ computerlike things there. I don't want to have to use a monitor in my monitor. Sure, yes, you could switch back and forth, but if you're doing that you're taking the features out of the metaverse. I dunno. If it succedes there are going to be several in between steps, I think.
-nick
I've seen this one in the sci-fi channel. Whatever they do to it, DONT TRY TO SEE WHATS INSIDE.
OK, so as a number of users have said, this isn't very interesting if it's a home directory. Other users have, correctly imo stated that this becomes much more interesting if the directory contains the information they authenticate against. I think this is true, but what if taken one step further -
1. ipod phone will almost certainly have a camera - how nice would it be if you could "automatically" log in with a quick iris scan?
2. what if the device autmated "synced" snapshot backups? If the ipod only synced at the end of your session when you were going to logg out, it would autmatically have a "last good" snapshot. Since this is unlikely, what if you could choose to restore instead of update one of the computers your data was on.
3. I think the idea of keeping a journal off disk is pretty interesting too. Got a virus? Lets check the read-only file checksum to see if it changed? It did? lets restore it from the good copy.
I'll tell you though - as much as I like my ipod, I really wish my smartphone could do all this. I carry it with me everywhere, it's got the potential, but the crappy software & drm makes it abysmal to use for anything but phone/web/email. Doing anything interesting is pretty much out.
I've never understood this argument. I was never under the impression that most OSS project's goal was to "run in the enterprise" or "succede in a business environment" -- I'm sure there are a few, but not the majority. I think the majority of projects have a goal like "make the best free unix OS" or "make the best IDE" or "Make the best web server" if they get succede, or get close then enterprise shops will consider them. There may be licenese and support issues which are separate, but I'd be surprised if I saw that goal on a OSS project website. That's a business goal more appropriate to Microsoft, Redhat, or IBM.
If not having google/yahoo/msn search in china would in any way stop the filtering from happening, I would argue that they should not take any part in it. However, it won't. There are a lot of smart computer scientists in china, and iirc lycos may have even been bought be a chinese company (don't quote me on that). All it means is that US companies would miss out an a huge opportunity to take advantage of an area where US technology is ahead of the compitition, or at least running with the absolute forefront. With all the problems that US technology has, why in gods name would we put up another barrier?
First off, on the surface, sure, it is a bad idea- but it already exists. If you are under a certain limit of internet use, you pay for dialup. If you are moderate/normal you buy broadband. If you have excessive needs, you start to look at "business class" solutions which can go all the way up to big bonded OC-XXX and fiber. What they're really talking about it standardizing cutting up the midrange portion, and here's the thing - with the advent of wireless networking, and the enormous improvment on computer resources in therms of memory, processing power, storage, etc, and the fact that mainstream internet providers don't use ipv6 - do you really think people woudln't start putting up beacons on their wireless routers and running some kind of dynamic routing protocol like bgp/ebgp/ospf if the prices/annoyance factor got too high? Calling up comcast and having them send someone to the house and "install your internet" is pretty nice and all, but if it became a huge hassle, or overly expensive, how long do you think that would last? We used to run bbs's that would connect to each other and transmit email from one end of the country to the other over 9600bps modems... do you really think we couldn't put together a gurillanet? I mean, damn folks - ip includes a 'broadcast address' for a reason.
Uhm, have you looked around to see how much it costs to get your web/mail/databases hosted? It's cheap as hell. I started at 2.95/month a few years ago, and now I pay a whopping $9/month. Maybe I'm just insane, but I would *never* consider hosting my stuff at an employer's work, even if they were OK with it and I had no plans of leaving ever. It's just shady. What if your php script that you just threw together playing around and that didn't go through QA had a hole in it and your server got compromized... or whatever.
Leave work at work and home at home,
Nick
In many ways privacy does protect that, and in a sense that's one of america's founding principals, that citizens reserve the right to become "terrorists" if the government gets out of hand. To the British, the american "rebels" were terrorists. This is the thing that scares me most about terrorism, it's persicuting an "idea" not a crime. The people who crashed a plane into the towers were MURDERERS -- who cares what their motivation is. It's like "hate crimes" - is it any worse to kill a random stranger than it is to kill someone because they're a certain race that you hate?
Also, if the government had just cause to think that those two friends were plotting to crash a plane into a building, then they should go to a court, state for the record what they think, and why, and with a judge's permission tap the phone for a certain amount of time. If it turns out they were wrong, they should tell the person and destroy all evidence. They shouldn't be able to get a secret warrant and never disclose what/why the did to anyone.
The whole idea is that there's supposed to be a balance. The balance is getting out of whack.
that's /mostly/ true, but since hard drives are magnetic, each time you flip a bit (1->0 or 0->1) you loose a *tiiiiny* bit of magnatism. If you have the proper equiptment you can still recover data from a "zeroed" hard drive. It used to be the US government agencies would require a disk be randomly zero'd 5 times before it could be discarded. Now they probably melt them.