Hear hear. It's no worse than the thousands of amateur musicians who cut demo tapes on their four-tracks so they can play them in their car and maybe distribute a few copies to their friends. At least it keeps them off the streets, right?
Frankly, I happen to think that a personal web page has rather more point than a personalized number plate, but you don't see those going out of fashion, do you? Who the heck cares that the Beemer in front of them is driven by someone whose initials are apparently JRP? Or they try to get clever and advertise, so you see they're an EYE DOC. Brilliant -- I wonder how many more eye docs there are in my vicinity and how on earth I'm supposed to find the one with the flash number plate on his Mercedes?
At least a personal web site gives people the chance to hone their HTML skills (if they so desire), share their opinions (in a far more passive environment than if they're standing on a street corner yelling -- I can easily navigate away from an annoying web page), and maybe provide some obscure information that just might come up on a Google hit one day and make the day for someone searching for that obscure information. I've had this happen a few times -- the piece of information I was looking for was nowhere to be found except on someone's personal web page.
If you think personal web pages are pointless, then ask yourself how many times some poor user's web page has bitten the big one after succumbing to the/. effect?
In an article about building your own storage server, why are they spending so much time talking about irrelevant things like *video card's 3-d performance* (128 MB in a storage server ??), mouse and keyboard choice, and yet fail to even so much as mention (as far as I could tell) OS choice or software ?
Look at the banner on the pages -- "Home of the Hardcore Gamer". It's because they're gamers and know everything about tuning a system for games, but don't know the first thing about building a server. What they've ended up with is a mish-mash that won't serve any particular purpose well, except possibly as a rather decent PC for a secretary (except no secretary would want something that big at her desk).
As one reads through the article, what leaps out is that they're most comfortable when debating relative merits of 3D video cards and building uber-fancy custom machines designed for gaming excellence. Good for them, but this is far removed from building a server.
It's got a terabyte of utterly unsafe storage. No RAID, no nothing.
It's got a video card which is overkill for a server but which they disdain as a low-end 3D graphics card.
They've got one hard drive for the system and everything else as data, so they're not building a "high performance" system or else they'd have a separate drive for paging.
They haven't discussed the types of files they'll be storing at all -- will they be tiny text files, medium sized spreadsheets and documents, or massively large presentations and CAD files? This affects how you configure your system.
Their approach to planning for hardware failure is "we bought the better quality stuff so we don't have to worry so much about MTBF". No need for RAID or redundant power supplies. (Although oddly enough they've chucked in two NICs.)
Did I mention no RAID? Yet they've bought a 3D graphics card (overkill), a nice mouse (in case they want to do graphics editing or perform fast wrist actions on their storage server), a wireless keyboard, and a fun little LED display to tell them how fast the CPU fan is spinning.
Look at how they're future-proofing the system, by the way. They anticipate going through 2 TB of data every year. So every six months they're going to pull out the existing 1 TB of storage, plop into an external array, and put in a new set of disks. I wonder how long this system is supposed to last...
All in all a very odd system indeed. In fact, a pseudo-server built by gamers with no understanding of how to build a server.
I think, in retrospect, this is fascinating, given it was written in 1998, and taking into consideration what happened a few months ago in Iraq.
The end of effective Iraqi resistance came with a rapidity which surprised us all, and we were perhaps psychologically unprepared for the sudden transition from fighting to peacemaking.
There was an article on these people in the Philadelphia Inquirer rag about a month ago, with rather more detail (unfortunately the Inquirer doesn't appear to archive articles older than seven days; I found it by searching, but was directed to a pay site to retrieve the article, so no karma-whoring on that one, sorry).
I seem to recall (and the article here bears that out) that they were at pains to point out they are only responsible for creating the database of streets. The service (be it Yahoo Maps or your GPS manufacturer) that buys that database information is then responsible for implementing the algorithm. Ergo, don't blame them if you end up driving in a very circuitous route.
If the government dictated what style of clothes are legal to wear, you'd probably be very interested in that GQ issue...
Taken as a stand-alone statement, that's fair enough, I suppose -- but how on earth does this relate to the thread? Are you trying to imply the government currently dictates or will in the future dictate what web server it's legal to run?
We use both of these. Sharepoint (yeah, it's Microsoft -- deal with it) is great; it'll allow a lot of customization, looks snazzy, etc., etc. Hummingbird's products -- I hesitate to bring them up, because they're so problematic (and their technical support is atrocious), but when they work, they're rather fabulous. They also have a KM product which can crawl the DM (document management) repository, web sites, databases, file servers, and more, and present all the results in a collated view.
He's a lawyer. You think he gives a flying stuff about the politics and ideologies behind any of this? He wants more money, and the way to get more money is to be known, and the way to be known is to try and pick high-profile or contentious cases. Failing that, at least go for one which has plenty of opportunity for personal enrichment.
Such a good point! One of the most telling points was the tale of nine machines being removed from the site for repair and then brought back onsite in violation of election laws. Forget for a moment the problem of the election machines failing. Aren't there supposed to be people supervising who know that you can't do this and who should've stopped the machines from being removed and brought back on-site? If there is a problem, then there needs to be a protocol to follow, and the people in charge at each voting site must know that protocol and enforce it.
By the by, I live just outside of Philadelphia and we had an election yesterday (mayor and various other positions). Listening to the news, I kept hearing the news casters talking about how wonderful it was to be able to participate in this democratic process and just about going into tears over how fabulous it was to have this right. They sounded like they were somewhere that had only had free elections for a few years and everyone was still getting used to the idea.
Try figuring out why New Zealanders celebrate Guy Fawkes Day as well.
Okay, fairly obvious, all the ex-pats, British colony, all that...but, more to the point, it's just a really good excuse to let off fireworks and burn enormous bonfires. And what kiwi doesn't like that?
We're dealing with words over two hundred years old. If their meaning is not clear enough after updating to the modern vernacular, one need only consult the context: there would have been no American revolution had there not been a skilled armed citizenry to carry it out.
Careful...I think you (and several other people in this thread) have just violated the PATRIOT act.
Two days ago I found a similar e-mail in my inbox which essentially followed the same lines, but was directed at Comcast users. It stated that there had been a problem with my billing credit card, which could be due to any of the following list of plausible-sounding issues, and directed me to click on a hyperlink to rectify the problem. As it happens, my Comcast account is provided by work as part of my on-call requirements, and they pay all the bills. The scary part is, even looking at the header, everything appeared to resolve to a Comcast address (I think it was comcast.biz), except for one little address which was a Qwest address.
Comcast already knows about it; you can see their (extremely not obvious) warning here.
Bugger me...you're looking for people to step into the real world here, aren't you?
Sniping aside, I concur. So...who's going to take them to court? Anyone? I can't, I don't do any development, so have no claim against them. Taco/Neal/Michael/et al.? Or are we going to hope IBM or Red Hat steps up to the plate?
Right. Here's a little question: if another country were doing this, wouldn't that justify a preemptive strike under the current administration's policies? You can't just say that it's okay for us and not for anyone else because we're the good guys and you're the bad guys and not expect some dissent. (Well, maybe if you're extraordinarily self-indulgent, you can.)
From the article:
Despite the concerns, work on lethal new pox viruses seems likely to continue in the US. When members of the audience in Geneva questioned the need for such experiments, an American voice in the back boomed out: "Nine-eleven". There were murmurs of agreement.
And therein lies a big problem. Despite the fact that much of the rest of the world (not just middle Eastern countries; England, for example, has been under the IRA's reign of terror for decades) has suffered from terrorism for years, "9-11" is a catch-all justification for anything the U.S. wishes to do.
Bush's team has squandered an awful lot of good-will in the past two years. They've stated and demonstrated that they are willing and able to proclaim a country or a regime as a threat and do whatever they like on that basis. This is the true shame; the entire country of America is now loathed by vast segments of the world's population a mere two years after a brutal attack which garnered world-wide sympathy, and it is due to the activities, by and large, of a handful of people: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, and perhaps one or two others.
The Hummer just manages to eek out double digit fuel economy.
And in a fit of remarkable inanity, California, that most tree-hugging of all states, just elected as governor the individual responsible for ensuring the general public can drive the stupid things.
Well, I started reading all the/. comments, and I found...a pop-up from a survey/marketing firm which appears every so often as I go through/. Now, I'm guessing that most/.ers have pop-ups disabled, but I'm at work with a tightly controlled desktop environment that includes IE, so have no such luxuries.
By the way...if you mod this as funny, you've got it wrong. This isn't a joke. Try interesting or something. I can't believe I've not seen this mentioned already.
Not unless you installed the MSDE engine as an option when you installed Access 2000 or better. By default it's always been the Jet engine (which was also used, eg, for WINS). Granted, it's not explicitly stated, but as they're talking about MDB files and Access I suspect it's a Jet engine; otherwise they'd be talking about MSDE files. (By the way, one of the differences between the two engines is that MSDE provides a transaction log file.)
Incredible, isn't it? I found myself wondering just how many rows are going to be stored in their Access system on a typical machine. Never mind about performance issues (as others have pointed out) -- what about the robust (or otherwise) nature of Access when it comes to handling large quantities of data, and the recoverability of such data in a problem scenario?
I've seen people try to write little Access databases in the past and expect them to cope with millions of rows of data (usually they're the people who think referential integrity means how accurate the encyclopaedia is). I always heartily suggest they consider keeping the Access front end, if they must, for the forms and reports and so forth, but link the tables to a real database engine. You know, one which has transaction logging and can run DBCC, for example.
You have aptly demonstrated you are too stupid to be reading Slashdot. Here's a hint -- you agree with the parent! You just insulted someone by affirming what that individual said.
And you got modded up for it! Looks like you're not the only person around today who's too stupid to be reading Slashdot.
Reading through that exchange, Ken Clark had also better hope the interviewer at his next job doesn't place a particularly high value on English skills and the ability to construct a sentence. Mind you, I could just be miffed because he violated one of my pet peeves -- loosing when he meant to use losing.
Sitting here with some servers that have 280+ day uptimes.
Whippie skip. I'm sitting here with some servers that have 400+ day uptimes, and at least one which is at 699 days, 16 hours, and 49 minutes as I write this post.
Whereas the more astute will know that Australia is properly considered the West Island of New Zealand.
(To make that slightly less localized humour -- NZ has two main islands, imaginatively named the North Island and the South Island. There's also a third very small island at the bottom, but nobody talks about it very much because it's called Stewart Island, and that confuses the system too much.)
Sure...and the high-end super-expensive video cards that gamers buy are over-priced and unnecessary.
The article is talking primarily about the editing software -- but you still need to get the sound recorded. That requires professional (read: expensive) microphones, isolated booths, a full rack or three of processing equipment, someone who knows how to mic up the acoustic drums (notoriously difficult) if you're not using electronic drums, etc., etc., etc.
I've done some session work, and an insane amount of equipment and hard work goes into getting a decent sound, as opposed to a garage sound. By the way, that also contributes to the cost -- the hours of skilled and expert labour required to do it properly. A recording engineer needs as much technical expertise as a computer engineer, and that experience doesn't come cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is off-topic, but...you might also want to read The Motley Fool's opinion on Red Hat.
Hear hear. It's no worse than the thousands of amateur musicians who cut demo tapes on their four-tracks so they can play them in their car and maybe distribute a few copies to their friends. At least it keeps them off the streets, right?
/. effect?
Frankly, I happen to think that a personal web page has rather more point than a personalized number plate, but you don't see those going out of fashion, do you? Who the heck cares that the Beemer in front of them is driven by someone whose initials are apparently JRP? Or they try to get clever and advertise, so you see they're an EYE DOC. Brilliant -- I wonder how many more eye docs there are in my vicinity and how on earth I'm supposed to find the one with the flash number plate on his Mercedes?
At least a personal web site gives people the chance to hone their HTML skills (if they so desire), share their opinions (in a far more passive environment than if they're standing on a street corner yelling -- I can easily navigate away from an annoying web page), and maybe provide some obscure information that just might come up on a Google hit one day and make the day for someone searching for that obscure information. I've had this happen a few times -- the piece of information I was looking for was nowhere to be found except on someone's personal web page.
If you think personal web pages are pointless, then ask yourself how many times some poor user's web page has bitten the big one after succumbing to the
Look at the banner on the pages -- "Home of the Hardcore Gamer". It's because they're gamers and know everything about tuning a system for games, but don't know the first thing about building a server. What they've ended up with is a mish-mash that won't serve any particular purpose well, except possibly as a rather decent PC for a secretary (except no secretary would want something that big at her desk).
As one reads through the article, what leaps out is that they're most comfortable when debating relative merits of 3D video cards and building uber-fancy custom machines designed for gaming excellence. Good for them, but this is far removed from building a server.
It's got a terabyte of utterly unsafe storage. No RAID, no nothing.
It's got a video card which is overkill for a server but which they disdain as a low-end 3D graphics card.
They've got one hard drive for the system and everything else as data, so they're not building a "high performance" system or else they'd have a separate drive for paging.
They haven't discussed the types of files they'll be storing at all -- will they be tiny text files, medium sized spreadsheets and documents, or massively large presentations and CAD files? This affects how you configure your system.
Their approach to planning for hardware failure is "we bought the better quality stuff so we don't have to worry so much about MTBF". No need for RAID or redundant power supplies. (Although oddly enough they've chucked in two NICs.)
Did I mention no RAID? Yet they've bought a 3D graphics card (overkill), a nice mouse (in case they want to do graphics editing or perform fast wrist actions on their storage server), a wireless keyboard, and a fun little LED display to tell them how fast the CPU fan is spinning.
Look at how they're future-proofing the system, by the way. They anticipate going through 2 TB of data every year. So every six months they're going to pull out the existing 1 TB of storage, plop into an external array, and put in a new set of disks. I wonder how long this system is supposed to last...
All in all a very odd system indeed. In fact, a pseudo-server built by gamers with no understanding of how to build a server.
I think, in retrospect, this is fascinating, given it was written in 1998, and taking into consideration what happened a few months ago in Iraq.
The end of effective Iraqi resistance came with a rapidity which surprised us all, and we were perhaps psychologically unprepared for the sudden transition from fighting to peacemaking.
There was an article on these people in the Philadelphia Inquirer rag about a month ago, with rather more detail (unfortunately the Inquirer doesn't appear to archive articles older than seven days; I found it by searching, but was directed to a pay site to retrieve the article, so no karma-whoring on that one, sorry).
I seem to recall (and the article here bears that out) that they were at pains to point out they are only responsible for creating the database of streets. The service (be it Yahoo Maps or your GPS manufacturer) that buys that database information is then responsible for implementing the algorithm. Ergo, don't blame them if you end up driving in a very circuitous route.
If the government dictated what style of clothes are legal to wear, you'd probably be very interested in that GQ issue...
Taken as a stand-alone statement, that's fair enough, I suppose -- but how on earth does this relate to the thread? Are you trying to imply the government currently dictates or will in the future dictate what web server it's legal to run?
a document management system, such as those by Hummingbird
a portal, such as Sharepoint
We use both of these. Sharepoint (yeah, it's Microsoft -- deal with it) is great; it'll allow a lot of customization, looks snazzy, etc., etc. Hummingbird's products -- I hesitate to bring them up, because they're so problematic (and their technical support is atrocious), but when they work, they're rather fabulous. They also have a KM product which can crawl the DM (document management) repository, web sites, databases, file servers, and more, and present all the results in a collated view.
He's a lawyer. You think he gives a flying stuff about the politics and ideologies behind any of this? He wants more money, and the way to get more money is to be known, and the way to be known is to try and pick high-profile or contentious cases. Failing that, at least go for one which has plenty of opportunity for personal enrichment.
Such a good point! One of the most telling points was the tale of nine machines being removed from the site for repair and then brought back onsite in violation of election laws. Forget for a moment the problem of the election machines failing. Aren't there supposed to be people supervising who know that you can't do this and who should've stopped the machines from being removed and brought back on-site? If there is a problem, then there needs to be a protocol to follow, and the people in charge at each voting site must know that protocol and enforce it.
By the by, I live just outside of Philadelphia and we had an election yesterday (mayor and various other positions). Listening to the news, I kept hearing the news casters talking about how wonderful it was to be able to participate in this democratic process and just about going into tears over how fabulous it was to have this right. They sounded like they were somewhere that had only had free elections for a few years and everyone was still getting used to the idea.
Do they want them dead, or alive?
Yes!
Try figuring out why New Zealanders celebrate Guy Fawkes Day as well.
Okay, fairly obvious, all the ex-pats, British colony, all that...but, more to the point, it's just a really good excuse to let off fireworks and burn enormous bonfires. And what kiwi doesn't like that?
We're dealing with words over two hundred years old. If their meaning is not clear enough after updating to the modern vernacular, one need only consult the context: there would have been no American revolution had there not been a skilled armed citizenry to carry it out.
Careful...I think you (and several other people in this thread) have just violated the PATRIOT act.
Two days ago I found a similar e-mail in my inbox which essentially followed the same lines, but was directed at Comcast users. It stated that there had been a problem with my billing credit card, which could be due to any of the following list of plausible-sounding issues, and directed me to click on a hyperlink to rectify the problem. As it happens, my Comcast account is provided by work as part of my on-call requirements, and they pay all the bills. The scary part is, even looking at the header, everything appeared to resolve to a Comcast address (I think it was comcast.biz), except for one little address which was a Qwest address.
Comcast already knows about it; you can see their (extremely not obvious) warning here.
Bugger me...you're looking for people to step into the real world here, aren't you?
Sniping aside, I concur. So...who's going to take them to court? Anyone? I can't, I don't do any development, so have no claim against them. Taco/Neal/Michael/et al.? Or are we going to hope IBM or Red Hat steps up to the plate?
Right. Here's a little question: if another country were doing this, wouldn't that justify a preemptive strike under the current administration's policies? You can't just say that it's okay for us and not for anyone else because we're the good guys and you're the bad guys and not expect some dissent. (Well, maybe if you're extraordinarily self-indulgent, you can.)
From the article:
Despite the concerns, work on lethal new pox viruses seems likely to continue in the US. When members of the audience in Geneva questioned the need for such experiments, an American voice in the back boomed out: "Nine-eleven". There were murmurs of agreement.
And therein lies a big problem. Despite the fact that much of the rest of the world (not just middle Eastern countries; England, for example, has been under the IRA's reign of terror for decades) has suffered from terrorism for years, "9-11" is a catch-all justification for anything the U.S. wishes to do.
Bush's team has squandered an awful lot of good-will in the past two years. They've stated and demonstrated that they are willing and able to proclaim a country or a regime as a threat and do whatever they like on that basis. This is the true shame; the entire country of America is now loathed by vast segments of the world's population a mere two years after a brutal attack which garnered world-wide sympathy, and it is due to the activities, by and large, of a handful of people: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, and perhaps one or two others.
What a tragedy. What a very real tragedy.
The Hummer just manages to eek out double digit fuel economy.
And in a fit of remarkable inanity, California, that most tree-hugging of all states, just elected as governor the individual responsible for ensuring the general public can drive the stupid things.
Well, I started reading all the /. comments, and I found...a pop-up from a survey/marketing firm which appears every so often as I go through /. Now, I'm guessing that most /.ers have pop-ups disabled, but I'm at work with a tightly controlled desktop environment that includes IE, so have no such luxuries.
By the way...if you mod this as funny, you've got it wrong. This isn't a joke. Try interesting or something. I can't believe I've not seen this mentioned already.
Not unless you installed the MSDE engine as an option when you installed Access 2000 or better. By default it's always been the Jet engine (which was also used, eg, for WINS). Granted, it's not explicitly stated, but as they're talking about MDB files and Access I suspect it's a Jet engine; otherwise they'd be talking about MSDE files. (By the way, one of the differences between the two engines is that MSDE provides a transaction log file.)
Incredible, isn't it? I found myself wondering just how many rows are going to be stored in their Access system on a typical machine. Never mind about performance issues (as others have pointed out) -- what about the robust (or otherwise) nature of Access when it comes to handling large quantities of data, and the recoverability of such data in a problem scenario?
I've seen people try to write little Access databases in the past and expect them to cope with millions of rows of data (usually they're the people who think referential integrity means how accurate the encyclopaedia is). I always heartily suggest they consider keeping the Access front end, if they must, for the forms and reports and so forth, but link the tables to a real database engine. You know, one which has transaction logging and can run DBCC, for example.
You have aptly demonstrated you are too stupid to be reading Slashdot. Here's a hint -- you agree with the parent! You just insulted someone by affirming what that individual said.
And you got modded up for it! Looks like you're not the only person around today who's too stupid to be reading Slashdot.
Reading through that exchange, Ken Clark had also better hope the interviewer at his next job doesn't place a particularly high value on English skills and the ability to construct a sentence. Mind you, I could just be miffed because he violated one of my pet peeves -- loosing when he meant to use losing.
Sitting here with some servers that have 280+ day uptimes.
Whippie skip. I'm sitting here with some servers that have 400+ day uptimes, and at least one which is at 699 days, 16 hours, and 49 minutes as I write this post.
Yes, it's NT. Now, what's your point?
FP and it's coherent, relevant, and even somewhat insightful. Next up -- bacon sandwiches go for an afternoon flutter around the skies.
Some might argue that nz is our eighth state
Whereas the more astute will know that Australia is properly considered the West Island of New Zealand.
(To make that slightly less localized humour -- NZ has two main islands, imaginatively named the North Island and the South Island. There's also a third very small island at the bottom, but nobody talks about it very much because it's called Stewart Island, and that confuses the system too much.)
Sure...and the high-end super-expensive video cards that gamers buy are over-priced and unnecessary.
The article is talking primarily about the editing software -- but you still need to get the sound recorded. That requires professional (read: expensive) microphones, isolated booths, a full rack or three of processing equipment, someone who knows how to mic up the acoustic drums (notoriously difficult) if you're not using electronic drums, etc., etc., etc.
I've done some session work, and an insane amount of equipment and hard work goes into getting a decent sound, as opposed to a garage sound. By the way, that also contributes to the cost -- the hours of skilled and expert labour required to do it properly. A recording engineer needs as much technical expertise as a computer engineer, and that experience doesn't come cheap.