Chances are the password policy IS enforced, but they have to mention it in the slides anyway. Most government systems actually have password requirements so stringent that I think they're counterproductive, since they're well into the "I'd better write that down or I'll never remember it" category. Technically writing it down is a violation too, but people are people.
If they're citing "bandwidth issues" as the reason for blocking Facebook/Myspace/etc... then they're just outright lying to you. Neither of those sites are going to generate the kind of bandwidth that requires administrator intervention.
Ok, you can pay for thousands of poor kids education yourself then. They certainly can't afford private schools. Or do you plan to work your business around half of the population being illiterate? You better like toll roads too, because that's all your getting, and they'll only exist on profitable routes. You can forget about a road to your house unless you build it yourself.
The fact of the matter is that a person or corporation simply wouldn't do much of the stuff government does. There is a lot of stuff that really needs to be done to maintain a stable economy that is just not directly profitable. Educating poor people (giving them the ability to break the cycle of poverty and become productive citizens that will support your businesses), building secondary roads, the entire water distribution grid (private water is expensive), power to rural areas, phone to rural areas (don't kid yourself, those were built on the government dollar), environmental protection (the invisible hand promotes the tragedy of the commons), resource management (can you imagine what kind of mess the airwaves would be without the FCC?), and much more. Private police forces are a disaster waiting to happen. I know you hate the idea that someone else is spending your money, but any other system is just not realistic.
You're probably thinking "but the government didn't use to do that and we got by just fine!" Unfortunatly that's not actually the case. People muddled through, but the governmental solution turned out to be far superior in the long run. When spending $100 a year (current dollars) on road maintence saves you $1000 in car/wagon repairs each year you realize an enormous cost savings, despite the fact that it's the big mean government spending your money and not you. Alone you have no hope of maintaining roads, so no matter how much freedom you have, you can't go anywhere. If you try to form corporations they will inevitable become large and bloated (because you'd have to in order to manage a project that big) and at that point you're no better off than you were with a government. In fact you're a bit worse off because you can't vote people out of a corporation usually and they will be accountable to only a select subsection of the residents (the ones who invested in the corporation) instead of all of them. You could find yourself limited to only the roads in your local corporation!
Back in the real world however, you can't overthrow the government whenever you don't agree with it, especially when they have lots of guns and tanks and all you have are disgruntled peasents. Sometimes civil disobediance is the best policy. Besides, you can't generate outrage against something like this until most of the people actually know about it, and even then many of them will believe the government line that they're only blocking "harmful materials" that you shouldn't be looking at anyway. Enough people start getting in trouble over bypassing the firewall and you might actually start educating the public about this.
Wouldn't someone interested in defrauding the system still have his friend run up the price an hour or two before the end of the auction to catch the snipers? I mean it's not like he actually has to sell the thing, and he's only out his Ebay fees (which do add up after awhile).
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
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· Score: 3, Informative
That's what I've always thought too. The people who come in and snipe at the last minute always end up paying more than I would have for the item because I set my one bid to what I'm willing to pay and then leave the auction alone. While this means I don't get as many items as the snipers, it also means that I don't end up paying more than retail for an item like far too many ebay users I've seen. Unless you're bidding on an game system on the day it's released or something crazy like that, I'd prefer to wait until a good deal rolls around instead of overpaying for my item just to make sure I get it.
You're looking through history with the rose colored glasses of the rich history book writers of the time. The early US government was pretty ineffectual and only managed because it didn't have any real challenges to stress the government. Also, we'd be the laughingstock of the world if we ditched Welfare, Social Security, the FDA, the Federal Highway System, the Department of Defense, Public Education, and all of the other things people expect from their government.
Despite what you might think, you wouldn't be any richer either. Not unless you were supremely lucky to latch onto some exploitable resource. Regular business would grind to a halt as the infastructure collapsed. Even the super expensive education system provides more money to businesses over the long term than any savings in taxes could ever provide. The highway system is the same way, and it's also monumentally expensive. A large mass of poor people with no hope of social mobility (can't afford education, can't afford to even drive on the roads) is not good for society.
One big downside is that it's not really used on the internet, so it's really hard to get experiance with it on a daily basis. Just try to ask your ISP for an IPv6 address, it probably won't do any good because their routers don't have IPv6 turned on anyway. There is only a handful of hosts on the internet that have IPv6 addresses at all.
If people have no real world experiance with it, they're not going to be very good at deploying it for 1,000 army boxes. Most admins don't even know how to enable IPv6 on their routers.
Back in the 90s there was a "dashboard computer" you could get for the Crown Vics that was basically a 486. A lot of precints got them, but they've mostly been replaced by (much faster and more reliable) laptops these days. It's not uncommon to see cops still using them from time to time though, even if they are rather slow.
Was their vaccination up to date? Most vaccines need a booster shot after a few years to maintain effeciveness. They'll never be as good as the full case of Whooping Cough you had either, but OTOH they didn't have to have Whooping Cough to get the immunity...
Your post actually surprised me a bit. I didn't think that was something you saw in the first world anymore.
The state of the art is already there, but due to concerns with weaponizing fissile materials, people won't let those sorts of reactors be built. There is a lot of justifiable paranoia around nuclear power since it often represents the worst case scenario in anti-terrorism planning. If the geopolitical situation were a bit more stable you could probably convince some people to build them, but that's not happening anytime soon.
It hasn't happened yet, but that's because companies having wisend up yet. They're still running on the treadmill of chasing the cheapest source of skilled labor around. Of course finding skilled labor in those countries is nearly impossible, so companies will have to work more at training their workforce, but since they're basically slave labor anyway this isn't such a big deal.
Another way to think of it is that Outsourcing is sort of like Foreign Aid on a large and sustainable scale. As you dump Foreign Aid into countries, assuming the aid actually gets into the hands of the people who need it, they tend to be better off than they were beforehand. The only way to prevent Foreign Aid from increasing the quality of life of its citizens is to make sure the Government steals it all before it can do any good.
With proper engineering and good materials you can reduce the failure rate, but the failure modes are still the same (water all over the rack). Worse, even if you reduce the failure rate by a factor of 3, that leaves you dead even when you have a datacenter with a measly 1,000 machines in it.
Other posters have mentioned tapping the building cooling system directly, which is a clever idea that might work someday, but is completely unrealistic in a datacenter you're building today. There is no building scale cooling system on the market with hundreds of taps for custom hoses that run down to a variety of rack mountable (but externally water cooled) equipment. Someone could probably make a lot of money coming up with a system like that, but unless you're installing a mainframe or a supercomputer it's completely unrealistic with current systems.
This should have been obvious to everybody, but what happens of course is that as companies hire their workers in what are essentally third world countries and pour money into the local economy in the form of foreign capital, the local economy picks up and suddenly the price of labor in the market increases. This makes the whole outsourcing thing a bit of a rat race as everytime you find some suitable location with cheap labor and build your factory/office there, the cost of labor begins to rise until it's hardly worth the trouble of outsoucing in the first place. Then you have to look for a new place with a new supply of cheap labor to start the process all over again.
The only way to prevent this from happening is to move into countries with brutal kleptocracies that will insure that the wages you pay never stimulate the local economy too much and the strong armed government thugs keep the people from setting up any sort of fair or equitable government. Your best bet is for those countries where two ethnic minorities have been fighting for centuries over some long lost or stupid reason. The downside is that it's very hard to find suitable working conditions in those type of countries because you generally have a big security problem and basic services like power and phone can be hard to come by (and unreliable). Also, you'll have to bribe government officials like crazy to avoid having your business raided, however in the long run it'll be cheaper than paying a decent wage to the workers. If you're really commited, you can surreptitiously fund one side of the conflict and give them enough of an upper hand to overthrow whatever government the country currently has and set up your own puppet government in its place. The only problem with this is that the puppets often try to sever ties with you once they get what they want (cheap slave labor and a country to call their own).
The problem is that datacenters don't use home PCs. The reason watercooling works so well in home systems is because the water stores an enormous amount of energy and you can put a giant heatsink on the back of your system with one big slow moving fan to get a very cool running (especially since you only use it for a few hours at a time and then let it cool back down afterwards) system that is very quiet but also takes up enormous amounts of space and will still get hot if you run it continuously at full bore for days on end.
Also, the failure modes for watercooled systems are much less forgiving than those of air cooled systems. At least with an air cooled system you don't have to worry about one computer leaking over everything in the rack.
On the other hand, that Bacteria is literally everywhere. Take a dab of just about any surface you havn't just scrubbed down with Clorox and you'll find colonies of it. Humans have been living with it for a millenia now and we're pretty well adapted to having it in the environment. In high concentrations it can be dangerous, but that's fairly difficult to achieve without actually taking a dump on something.
The best articles on Global Warming corrleate the teamperatures over thousands of years (showing the cyclical patterns) and then overlay the expected climate temperatures over the observed temperatures for the past 50 or 100 years. There is always a very noticable divergence from the expected temperatures, suggesting that the effect is man made. Interestingly enough, we can see human influence on global temperatures going back to pretty much the start of Agriculture and the building of giant rice patties in Asia, however in the past few decades the effect has become decidedly more pronounced.
SL makes headlines because it gives its users so much freedom to do whatever they want that it's where most of the interesting stuff happens. If you want to do someting totally off of the wall in an MMO type environment, SL is just about the only place you can do that. Nobody wants to read a story about how you were able to slay 20 Kobalds, but if you make thousands of dollars of real money legitmately out of what is noramally just a money sink, well that's newsworthy.
Oh, and I totally agree that SL needs a backend overhaul badly. The concept is fantastic, but the technology is dated and the servers are very badly overloaded (it takes forever to get your textures sometimes). The devlopers have apparently coded themselves into a corner however. Several attempts at updating the engine have been complete failures because the sheer number of hacks they have to port in from the old engine overwhelms them. They have a kind of working system that they can't make any major changes to without bringing down the whole house of cards.
I wonder what happens when some crazy Internet speculation turns out to be accurate? I mean what if Apple bought Nintendo next week (or vice versa), would the SEC investigate? Of course not, unless someone mysteriously invested a ton of money in one company or the other right before the merger. You can't be fined for idle speculation.
Didn't the RIAA already have this ad? I recall a connection being made from organized crime (MP3s are all made by organized crime, did you know that? -- RIAA), and terrorist funding.
It was hot on the heels of the "Marijuana funds terrorism!" anti-drug campaign.
It's hard to argue that MP3s weren't highly downloaded before ITMS opened up for the public, yet people went there in droves. I think given the chance for actually buying something at a reasonable price and downloading it illegally from China, most people would prefer to actually buy it. That's not to say everyone will (people still download MP3s), but it at least gives the people who want to be honest an option.
That's one thing I really hate about DRM. It punishes honest people for the actions of the thieves who are bypassing the DRM anyway. I wish more companies would take a look at what happened in the ebook field. Almost every publisher lost tons of money on proprietary and expensive ebook schemes where you had to buy some $100+ crappy piece of hardware to read some $10 ebook that was locked to the reader and expired after some time. To their shock and amazement, nobody was buying. However, Jim Baen decided to treat his customers like people and released his books in just about every reasonable format (all DRM free!) for a good price. Turns out he's making money hand over fist with the service, despite the convention wisdom that said that without DRM nobody would buy the things.
If you could somehow get the record companies to move past their paranoia and greed and open up something like iTunes without DRM and with an extremely extensive collection of music (at least as extensive as Amazon music for instance), I think you'd completely dominate the industry in no time and rake in money like crazy. Conventional wisdom says people would pirate like crazy off of such a service, but I bet your piracy numbers would hold pretty steady since the people who want to pirate will do it anyway and honest people would have a legal place to actually buy the music they want.
Wait, you're saying that cities that deploy free Wireless ethernet are going to set up tiering on the same system? It wouldn't be free then would it? How in the world would a private business be able to tier it any less? If anything, I'd expect the private businesses in this area to embrace tiering, because with the shared medium of wireless ethernet getting priority on your packets can be a big thing and these small companies are going to need money any way they can get it.
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Chances are the password policy IS enforced, but they have to mention it in the slides anyway. Most government systems actually have password requirements so stringent that I think they're counterproductive, since they're well into the "I'd better write that down or I'll never remember it" category. Technically writing it down is a violation too, but people are people.
If they're citing "bandwidth issues" as the reason for blocking Facebook/Myspace/etc... then they're just outright lying to you. Neither of those sites are going to generate the kind of bandwidth that requires administrator intervention.
Ok, you can pay for thousands of poor kids education yourself then. They certainly can't afford private schools. Or do you plan to work your business around half of the population being illiterate? You better like toll roads too, because that's all your getting, and they'll only exist on profitable routes. You can forget about a road to your house unless you build it yourself.
The fact of the matter is that a person or corporation simply wouldn't do much of the stuff government does. There is a lot of stuff that really needs to be done to maintain a stable economy that is just not directly profitable. Educating poor people (giving them the ability to break the cycle of poverty and become productive citizens that will support your businesses), building secondary roads, the entire water distribution grid (private water is expensive), power to rural areas, phone to rural areas (don't kid yourself, those were built on the government dollar), environmental protection (the invisible hand promotes the tragedy of the commons), resource management (can you imagine what kind of mess the airwaves would be without the FCC?), and much more. Private police forces are a disaster waiting to happen. I know you hate the idea that someone else is spending your money, but any other system is just not realistic.
You're probably thinking "but the government didn't use to do that and we got by just fine!" Unfortunatly that's not actually the case. People muddled through, but the governmental solution turned out to be far superior in the long run. When spending $100 a year (current dollars) on road maintence saves you $1000 in car/wagon repairs each year you realize an enormous cost savings, despite the fact that it's the big mean government spending your money and not you. Alone you have no hope of maintaining roads, so no matter how much freedom you have, you can't go anywhere. If you try to form corporations they will inevitable become large and bloated (because you'd have to in order to manage a project that big) and at that point you're no better off than you were with a government. In fact you're a bit worse off because you can't vote people out of a corporation usually and they will be accountable to only a select subsection of the residents (the ones who invested in the corporation) instead of all of them. You could find yourself limited to only the roads in your local corporation!
Back in the real world however, you can't overthrow the government whenever you don't agree with it, especially when they have lots of guns and tanks and all you have are disgruntled peasents. Sometimes civil disobediance is the best policy. Besides, you can't generate outrage against something like this until most of the people actually know about it, and even then many of them will believe the government line that they're only blocking "harmful materials" that you shouldn't be looking at anyway. Enough people start getting in trouble over bypassing the firewall and you might actually start educating the public about this.
Wouldn't someone interested in defrauding the system still have his friend run up the price an hour or two before the end of the auction to catch the snipers? I mean it's not like he actually has to sell the thing, and he's only out his Ebay fees (which do add up after awhile).
That's what I've always thought too. The people who come in and snipe at the last minute always end up paying more than I would have for the item because I set my one bid to what I'm willing to pay and then leave the auction alone. While this means I don't get as many items as the snipers, it also means that I don't end up paying more than retail for an item like far too many ebay users I've seen. Unless you're bidding on an game system on the day it's released or something crazy like that, I'd prefer to wait until a good deal rolls around instead of overpaying for my item just to make sure I get it.
You're looking through history with the rose colored glasses of the rich history book writers of the time. The early US government was pretty ineffectual and only managed because it didn't have any real challenges to stress the government. Also, we'd be the laughingstock of the world if we ditched Welfare, Social Security, the FDA, the Federal Highway System, the Department of Defense, Public Education, and all of the other things people expect from their government.
Despite what you might think, you wouldn't be any richer either. Not unless you were supremely lucky to latch onto some exploitable resource. Regular business would grind to a halt as the infastructure collapsed. Even the super expensive education system provides more money to businesses over the long term than any savings in taxes could ever provide. The highway system is the same way, and it's also monumentally expensive. A large mass of poor people with no hope of social mobility (can't afford education, can't afford to even drive on the roads) is not good for society.
One big downside is that it's not really used on the internet, so it's really hard to get experiance with it on a daily basis. Just try to ask your ISP for an IPv6 address, it probably won't do any good because their routers don't have IPv6 turned on anyway. There is only a handful of hosts on the internet that have IPv6 addresses at all.
If people have no real world experiance with it, they're not going to be very good at deploying it for 1,000 army boxes. Most admins don't even know how to enable IPv6 on their routers.
Back in the 90s there was a "dashboard computer" you could get for the Crown Vics that was basically a 486. A lot of precints got them, but they've mostly been replaced by (much faster and more reliable) laptops these days. It's not uncommon to see cops still using them from time to time though, even if they are rather slow.
Was their vaccination up to date? Most vaccines need a booster shot after a few years to maintain effeciveness. They'll never be as good as the full case of Whooping Cough you had either, but OTOH they didn't have to have Whooping Cough to get the immunity...
Your post actually surprised me a bit. I didn't think that was something you saw in the first world anymore.
The state of the art is already there, but due to concerns with weaponizing fissile materials, people won't let those sorts of reactors be built. There is a lot of justifiable paranoia around nuclear power since it often represents the worst case scenario in anti-terrorism planning. If the geopolitical situation were a bit more stable you could probably convince some people to build them, but that's not happening anytime soon.
It hasn't happened yet, but that's because companies having wisend up yet. They're still running on the treadmill of chasing the cheapest source of skilled labor around. Of course finding skilled labor in those countries is nearly impossible, so companies will have to work more at training their workforce, but since they're basically slave labor anyway this isn't such a big deal.
Another way to think of it is that Outsourcing is sort of like Foreign Aid on a large and sustainable scale. As you dump Foreign Aid into countries, assuming the aid actually gets into the hands of the people who need it, they tend to be better off than they were beforehand. The only way to prevent Foreign Aid from increasing the quality of life of its citizens is to make sure the Government steals it all before it can do any good.
With proper engineering and good materials you can reduce the failure rate, but the failure modes are still the same (water all over the rack). Worse, even if you reduce the failure rate by a factor of 3, that leaves you dead even when you have a datacenter with a measly 1,000 machines in it.
Other posters have mentioned tapping the building cooling system directly, which is a clever idea that might work someday, but is completely unrealistic in a datacenter you're building today. There is no building scale cooling system on the market with hundreds of taps for custom hoses that run down to a variety of rack mountable (but externally water cooled) equipment. Someone could probably make a lot of money coming up with a system like that, but unless you're installing a mainframe or a supercomputer it's completely unrealistic with current systems.
This should have been obvious to everybody, but what happens of course is that as companies hire their workers in what are essentally third world countries and pour money into the local economy in the form of foreign capital, the local economy picks up and suddenly the price of labor in the market increases. This makes the whole outsourcing thing a bit of a rat race as everytime you find some suitable location with cheap labor and build your factory/office there, the cost of labor begins to rise until it's hardly worth the trouble of outsoucing in the first place. Then you have to look for a new place with a new supply of cheap labor to start the process all over again.
The only way to prevent this from happening is to move into countries with brutal kleptocracies that will insure that the wages you pay never stimulate the local economy too much and the strong armed government thugs keep the people from setting up any sort of fair or equitable government. Your best bet is for those countries where two ethnic minorities have been fighting for centuries over some long lost or stupid reason. The downside is that it's very hard to find suitable working conditions in those type of countries because you generally have a big security problem and basic services like power and phone can be hard to come by (and unreliable). Also, you'll have to bribe government officials like crazy to avoid having your business raided, however in the long run it'll be cheaper than paying a decent wage to the workers. If you're really commited, you can surreptitiously fund one side of the conflict and give them enough of an upper hand to overthrow whatever government the country currently has and set up your own puppet government in its place. The only problem with this is that the puppets often try to sever ties with you once they get what they want (cheap slave labor and a country to call their own).
The problem is that datacenters don't use home PCs. The reason watercooling works so well in home systems is because the water stores an enormous amount of energy and you can put a giant heatsink on the back of your system with one big slow moving fan to get a very cool running (especially since you only use it for a few hours at a time and then let it cool back down afterwards) system that is very quiet but also takes up enormous amounts of space and will still get hot if you run it continuously at full bore for days on end.
Also, the failure modes for watercooled systems are much less forgiving than those of air cooled systems. At least with an air cooled system you don't have to worry about one computer leaking over everything in the rack.
On the other hand, that Bacteria is literally everywhere. Take a dab of just about any surface you havn't just scrubbed down with Clorox and you'll find colonies of it. Humans have been living with it for a millenia now and we're pretty well adapted to having it in the environment. In high concentrations it can be dangerous, but that's fairly difficult to achieve without actually taking a dump on something.
The best articles on Global Warming corrleate the teamperatures over thousands of years (showing the cyclical patterns) and then overlay the expected climate temperatures over the observed temperatures for the past 50 or 100 years. There is always a very noticable divergence from the expected temperatures, suggesting that the effect is man made. Interestingly enough, we can see human influence on global temperatures going back to pretty much the start of Agriculture and the building of giant rice patties in Asia, however in the past few decades the effect has become decidedly more pronounced.
Yeah, but it's a lot easier to have strict standards when you don't actually enforce them.
Maybe they could ask the manufacturers, who's cards this article is basically just an adveristement for, to foot the bill?
SL makes headlines because it gives its users so much freedom to do whatever they want that it's where most of the interesting stuff happens. If you want to do someting totally off of the wall in an MMO type environment, SL is just about the only place you can do that. Nobody wants to read a story about how you were able to slay 20 Kobalds, but if you make thousands of dollars of real money legitmately out of what is noramally just a money sink, well that's newsworthy.
Oh, and I totally agree that SL needs a backend overhaul badly. The concept is fantastic, but the technology is dated and the servers are very badly overloaded (it takes forever to get your textures sometimes). The devlopers have apparently coded themselves into a corner however. Several attempts at updating the engine have been complete failures because the sheer number of hacks they have to port in from the old engine overwhelms them. They have a kind of working system that they can't make any major changes to without bringing down the whole house of cards.
I wonder what happens when some crazy Internet speculation turns out to be accurate? I mean what if Apple bought Nintendo next week (or vice versa), would the SEC investigate? Of course not, unless someone mysteriously invested a ton of money in one company or the other right before the merger. You can't be fined for idle speculation.
I had some pretty good stargazing up on the continental divide in Colorado. It's also fun to watch for satellites just after dusk.
Didn't the RIAA already have this ad? I recall a connection being made from organized crime (MP3s are all made by organized crime, did you know that? -- RIAA), and terrorist funding.
It was hot on the heels of the "Marijuana funds terrorism!" anti-drug campaign.
It's hard to argue that MP3s weren't highly downloaded before ITMS opened up for the public, yet people went there in droves. I think given the chance for actually buying something at a reasonable price and downloading it illegally from China, most people would prefer to actually buy it. That's not to say everyone will (people still download MP3s), but it at least gives the people who want to be honest an option.
That's one thing I really hate about DRM. It punishes honest people for the actions of the thieves who are bypassing the DRM anyway. I wish more companies would take a look at what happened in the ebook field. Almost every publisher lost tons of money on proprietary and expensive ebook schemes where you had to buy some $100+ crappy piece of hardware to read some $10 ebook that was locked to the reader and expired after some time. To their shock and amazement, nobody was buying. However, Jim Baen decided to treat his customers like people and released his books in just about every reasonable format (all DRM free!) for a good price. Turns out he's making money hand over fist with the service, despite the convention wisdom that said that without DRM nobody would buy the things.
If you could somehow get the record companies to move past their paranoia and greed and open up something like iTunes without DRM and with an extremely extensive collection of music (at least as extensive as Amazon music for instance), I think you'd completely dominate the industry in no time and rake in money like crazy. Conventional wisdom says people would pirate like crazy off of such a service, but I bet your piracy numbers would hold pretty steady since the people who want to pirate will do it anyway and honest people would have a legal place to actually buy the music they want.
Wait, you're saying that cities that deploy free Wireless ethernet are going to set up tiering on the same system? It wouldn't be free then would it? How in the world would a private business be able to tier it any less? If anything, I'd expect the private businesses in this area to embrace tiering, because with the shared medium of wireless ethernet getting priority on your packets can be a big thing and these small companies are going to need money any way they can get it.