Civil wars can also cause De Beers big headaches - there is a river valley in Africa where many of the riverbeds have gemstones in such quantiity you can shovel them up. The area that falls within South African territory is strictly policed to stop the bottom falling out of the diamond market, but during a recent conflict in Angola, De Beers was having to buy up supply from diamond poachers to keep them off the market.
Apparently inflation in the local area was like the 1849 gold rush in the USA, with a can of coke going for over $100 cash in US currency.
De Beers has huge warehouses with years of supply stockpiled - they limit the sale of gemstones to 2 tons (IIRC = 10m carats) a year.
What they need is a standard magnetic parts pan, available from any local car parts/tools shop - these are like a surgical kidney basin, but usually rectangular and have a couple of big bad magnets on the underside enclosed in rubber covers - they stick to any steel surface, parts stick to them.
Of course, they may be so careful about weight that they are using aluminium / titanium for everything but I doubt if it would be worth extending to fasteners.
I don't mean to disillusion you, but that $200 ceiling only covers *desktop* Windows versions - NT/2000 Server starts at about $500 plus CALs; by my reckoning would be about $2-3k to replace Linux with Win2k on our little office Netfinity (not counting aggro and downtime)
Well, the important bit of the free speech for me is having the source code when you need to work through a problem. I have in the past had several vendor relationships where we got the source to proprietary, commercial software, and it proved highly useful to both parties.
In spite of the fact that the American F-86 Sabre and the Russian MiG-15 were roughly comparable aircraft, during the Korean War, the Sabres racked up a 10 to 1 kill ratio.
Why? Because the American pilots were better trained and more aggressive than their North Korean and Chinese opponents.
Actually, in fighter planes the equipment can make a huge difference (more than the airframe) to the combat performance, and you can bet that these guys were not running anything close to the USSR air force's spec of avionics and weapons.
British Aerospace makes no fewer than 5 major grades of the Tornado fighter, with dozens of variants thereof, and when you hear of them selling planes to Saudi Arabia for their "air force" of princes to fly, it is the bottom grade plane they get with crappy radar and tinkertoy armaments.
RedHat is pretty sloppy out of the box - like Windows it is designed to be convenient, not secure. Given moderate cluefulness, is however much easier to make it secure than it is to secure NT/2k.
Something like FreeBSD is a very different matter - it's as user friendly as a not very friendly thing, but as tight as a gnat's wotsit. Minimal effort required to get a decently tight system.
But watch out for Visa debit, whereby despite the cute Visa logo, your entire checking account and linked savings account can be siphoned and you will be left SOL.
In general, one of two things happens:
1. The e-tailer puts their collective PR head in the sand and pretends it will all go away
2. They tell the card issuers, who have no mechanism to handle reissuing cards on such a massive scale; card issuers put their collective...
Either way, Joe Consumer is SOL.
The only time I've ever installed Solaris to a Sun box that even had a video card, the machine was slated to be a workstation -- and even then, it was done via the black-text-on-white Sun video console.
Maybe so, but it was a hell of a long time ago. Solaris has had a colour GUI based install tool since 2.6 (1997).
I was just finishing my undergrad days there when this thing went live (on the LAN, not the web - does that date me:-)
These technology demonstrators may seem trite to the unititiated eye, but every new research area starts with baby steps.
Pointing it at the coffee pot was a bit of a joke, the entire distance from the CL tower through to the Cockcroft building is only 50 to 100 yards - research people are allowed to have fun too!
This is a classic case of picking the right tool for the right job.
If all you want is some structured storage for a low usage intranet app, and don't need transactional capability, then something like mySQL kicks butt. It's quick, reliable and not resource intensive. We use Bugzilla as a tracking tool for our Engineering department at maybe 500 hits a day and it rocks.
If you have a ton of mission critical data and you need serious availability, and you need transactional atomicity, when forget the marketing crap and TPC numbers, you have *only* two choices: Oracle and DB2. For each, you have two core platforms (Oracle on Solaris or HP/UX, DB2 on AIX or OS/390). For a serious big ass DB, there is NO substitute for proven technology on big iron. Period.
I am the world's biggest open source advocate, and we use both FreeBSD and Linux extensively in our production setup, but for the DB we use gold old Oracle on Solaris. It's not fancy. It's not cool. It's not cheap (but not violently expensive). But get this - it WORKS.
I know all the advocacy weenies who've never run a real production service will come out and say how Oracle 9i supports clustering on Linux, or (depending on flavour of weenie) how SQL Server can get a bazillion TPC's if you cluster 4,756 NT boxes together. It's all irrelevant horseshit. When your ass is on the line for uptime and data integrity, you'll be glad you bought a real RDBMS.
The analogy with anonymous ftp is flawed - there is an established precedent that anon ftp servers are for public use, and thus it is reasonable to assume you are welcome to use them; there is no such precedent for SMB default shares.
Regardless of posturing, piracy is the one and only raison d'etre of Napster. Regardless of what they implement or how effective it is, Napster is no more.
The canonical trilogy of cyberpunk novels (Neuromancer, Count Zero Interrupt, Mona Lisa Overdrive) by William Gibson is starting to look worryingly prescient.
I am trying to remember the name and author of the 70's sci-fi short story on the same topic with the two multi-nationals (one called "Goods and Services") both owned, unbeknownst to the public, by one guy.
The canonical, truly original game has to be "Lemmings" - I haven't seen anything so radically different be so successful before or since on any platform.
It was Google's decision to buy the company just for the data, and to take down the server farm, let go of the staff and sell the boxes. They could have kept the service running if they chose, but they chose not to.
The monthly charge for a 1000 ft cage at Exodus and the associated bandwidth is NOT cheap.
Actually, most FibreChannel implementations these days use copper cabling - the only time you need the fibre physical layer is for a large data centre (discs >10m from servers) or to do hot mirroring to another data center in another building (fibre runs up to several km are possible).
The main advantage of FC over SCSI are higher bandwidth and the ability to put a lot more spindles on a controller stack to make large RAID systems. Cabling is also simper (4 pins vs 68). At large scale it is more cost effective than SCSI.
Even mid market external RAID systems these days are moving from FC/SCSI to pure FC/FC.
...to support the aim of giving students some real sysadmin experience. It also deflects a lot of energies that would otherwise be devoted to hacking.
Edinburgh University's Tardis Project gives amateur admins free reign with a bunch of systems which are not used for any critical work. They learn both sysadmin tech and the interpersonal skills of an IT team.
You can't buy leaded fuel at normal stations in the USA, nor even now in Europe, but it doesn't stop people running vintage cars. They just have to make their own arrangements.
To suggest the web should be held back by the 0.001% of people out there with a Sun 3/20 or whatever is ludicrous.
So what's wrong with Netscape 3.0? Sure, it might not load any pages with any kind of javascript on it anymore, but really, don't you think thats MY problem? If I don't access your site because you choose to make it more complex than I am able to access, then that is YOUR problem and shame on you for not providing an adaquate alternative. Certainly, you don't HAVE to, and if I REALLY need to see your page, I will. Older browsers have certain features that make them ideal. They take up less space, they're a LOT less bloated, they load faster, and in some cases, they're a lot less bug ridden.
You're just inviting the alternative, which is to only support IE5+ on Windows because that's 93%+ of the market share, and f**k the rest of the world.
The basic dichototmy is that Tim Berners-Lee (if you haven't heard of him, get someone else to moderate your comment down:-) was aiming for representation of the structure of the content in HTML, while leaving the presentation of that structure up to the browser.
Most websites are aiming to control the presentation, using bastardisations of the original intent of the standard like explicit font declarations and using TABLE tags to control layout (when did you last see TABLE used to present tabular data?). HTML is simply not suited to pixel level control of the display.
What we need going forward, and quickly, is a strong definition from a body like the W3C on a pixel-level rich content, fully interactive, client-server (not transactional like HTTP) standard that eveyrone can implement. The Web, Mark II. Obvious ideas would be basing it on applets or Flash.
Right now, the real risk is that the W3C is going to become toothless; the real standard now is not HTML-anything, it's "what works in IE and mostly ok in Netscape" and it will rapidly become "what works in IE" only. Projects like Mozilla will quickly become catch-up imitators of IE the way StarOffice is of MS-Office.
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Civil wars can also cause De Beers big headaches - there is a river valley in Africa where many of the riverbeds have gemstones in such quantiity you can shovel them up. The area that falls within South African territory is strictly policed to stop the bottom falling out of the diamond market, but during a recent conflict in Angola, De Beers was having to buy up supply from diamond poachers to keep them off the market.
Apparently inflation in the local area was like the 1849 gold rush in the USA, with a can of coke going for over $100 cash in US currency.
De Beers has huge warehouses with years of supply stockpiled - they limit the sale of gemstones to 2 tons (IIRC = 10m carats) a year.
There's certainly no free software (that I'm aware of) that will handle the volume of email I go through at work.
Let me fill you in - Netscape Communicator is free (as in beer) and handles high volumes of email faster than Outlook (IMLE, YMMV)
emacs (RMAIL module) is free as in open source, and handles high volumes of email very well. So do a number of other open source tools.
What they need is a standard magnetic parts pan, available from any local car parts/tools shop - these are like a surgical kidney basin, but usually rectangular and have a couple of big bad magnets on the underside enclosed in rubber covers - they stick to any steel surface, parts stick to them. Of course, they may be so careful about weight that they are using aluminium / titanium for everything but I doubt if it would be worth extending to fasteners.
I don't mean to disillusion you, but that $200 ceiling only covers *desktop* Windows versions - NT/2000 Server starts at about $500 plus CALs; by my reckoning would be about $2-3k to replace Linux with Win2k on our little office Netfinity (not counting aggro and downtime)
:-)
Windows 2000 DCS is $10's of k to $100k range.
Scary, isn't it
Well, the important bit of the free speech for me is having the source code when you need to work through a problem. I have in the past had several vendor relationships where we got the source to proprietary, commercial software, and it proved highly useful to both parties.
In spite of the fact that the American F-86 Sabre and the Russian MiG-15 were roughly comparable aircraft, during the Korean War, the Sabres racked up a 10 to 1 kill ratio.
Why? Because the American pilots were better trained and more aggressive than their North Korean and Chinese opponents.
Actually, in fighter planes the equipment can make a huge difference (more than the airframe) to the combat performance, and you can bet that these guys were not running anything close to the USSR air force's spec of avionics and weapons.
British Aerospace makes no fewer than 5 major grades of the Tornado fighter, with dozens of variants thereof, and when you hear of them selling planes to Saudi Arabia for their "air force" of princes to fly, it is the bottom grade plane they get with crappy radar and tinkertoy armaments.
RedHat is pretty sloppy out of the box - like Windows it is designed to be convenient, not secure. Given moderate cluefulness, is however much easier to make it secure than it is to secure NT/2k.
Something like FreeBSD is a very different matter - it's as user friendly as a not very friendly thing, but as tight as a gnat's wotsit. Minimal effort required to get a decently tight system.
But watch out for Visa debit, whereby despite the cute Visa logo, your entire checking account and linked savings account can be siphoned and you will be left SOL.
In general, one of two things happens: 1. The e-tailer puts their collective PR head in the sand and pretends it will all go away 2. They tell the card issuers, who have no mechanism to handle reissuing cards on such a massive scale; card issuers put their collective... Either way, Joe Consumer is SOL.
The only time I've ever installed Solaris to a Sun box that even had a video card, the machine was slated to be a workstation -- and even then, it was done via the black-text-on-white Sun video console.
Maybe so, but it was a hell of a long time ago. Solaris has had a colour GUI based install tool since 2.6 (1997).
I was just finishing my undergrad days there when this thing went live (on the LAN, not the web - does that date me :-)
These technology demonstrators may seem trite to the unititiated eye, but every new research area starts with baby steps.
Pointing it at the coffee pot was a bit of a joke, the entire distance from the CL tower through to the Cockcroft building is only 50 to 100 yards - research people are allowed to have fun too!
This is a classic case of picking the right tool for the right job.
If all you want is some structured storage for a low usage intranet app, and don't need transactional capability, then something like mySQL kicks butt. It's quick, reliable and not resource intensive. We use Bugzilla as a tracking tool for our Engineering department at maybe 500 hits a day and it rocks.
If you have a ton of mission critical data and you need serious availability, and you need transactional atomicity, when forget the marketing crap and TPC numbers, you have *only* two choices: Oracle and DB2. For each, you have two core platforms (Oracle on Solaris or HP/UX, DB2 on AIX or OS/390). For a serious big ass DB, there is NO substitute for proven technology on big iron. Period.
I am the world's biggest open source advocate, and we use both FreeBSD and Linux extensively in our production setup, but for the DB we use gold old Oracle on Solaris. It's not fancy. It's not cool. It's not cheap (but not violently expensive). But get this - it WORKS.
I know all the advocacy weenies who've never run a real production service will come out and say how Oracle 9i supports clustering on Linux, or (depending on flavour of weenie) how SQL Server can get a bazillion TPC's if you cluster 4,756 NT boxes together. It's all irrelevant horseshit. When your ass is on the line for uptime and data integrity, you'll be glad you bought a real RDBMS.
Running your own DNS and all that is not a problem, DHCP or not. Use an offsite DNS provider.
Computer Science is not (directly) about software, it's about the theory of computation. Software is a practical application of computer science.
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" --Dijkstra
The analogy with anonymous ftp is flawed - there is an established precedent that anon ftp servers are for public use, and thus it is reasonable to assume you are welcome to use them; there is no such precedent for SMB default shares.
Regardless of posturing, piracy is the one and only raison d'etre of Napster. Regardless of what they implement or how effective it is, Napster is no more.
Spot on.
The canonical trilogy of cyberpunk novels (Neuromancer, Count Zero Interrupt, Mona Lisa Overdrive) by William Gibson is starting to look worryingly prescient.
I am trying to remember the name and author of the 70's sci-fi short story on the same topic with the two multi-nationals (one called "Goods and Services") both owned, unbeknownst to the public, by one guy.
The canonical, truly original game has to be "Lemmings" - I haven't seen anything so radically different be so successful before or since on any platform.
It was Google's decision to buy the company just for the data, and to take down the server farm, let go of the staff and sell the boxes. They could have kept the service running if they chose, but they chose not to.
The monthly charge for a 1000 ft cage at Exodus and the associated bandwidth is NOT cheap.
They bought everything, so they own it. They have no plans to use it.
Actually, most FibreChannel implementations these days use copper cabling - the only time you need the fibre physical layer is for a large data centre (discs >10m from servers) or to do hot mirroring to another data center in another building (fibre runs up to several km are possible).
The main advantage of FC over SCSI are higher bandwidth and the ability to put a lot more spindles on a controller stack to make large RAID systems. Cabling is also simper (4 pins vs 68). At large scale it is more cost effective than SCSI.
Even mid market external RAID systems these days are moving from FC/SCSI to pure FC/FC.
...to support the aim of giving students some real sysadmin experience. It also deflects a lot of energies that would otherwise be devoted to hacking.
Edinburgh University's Tardis Project gives amateur admins free reign with a bunch of systems which are not used for any critical work. They learn both sysadmin tech and the interpersonal skills of an IT team.
You can't buy leaded fuel at normal stations in the USA, nor even now in Europe, but it doesn't stop people running vintage cars. They just have to make their own arrangements.
To suggest the web should be held back by the 0.001% of people out there with a Sun 3/20 or whatever is ludicrous.
So what's wrong with Netscape 3.0? Sure, it might not load any pages with any kind of javascript on it anymore, but really, don't you think thats MY problem? If I don't access your site because you choose to make it more complex than I am able to access, then that is YOUR problem and shame on you for not providing an adaquate alternative. Certainly, you don't HAVE to, and if I REALLY need to see your page, I will. Older browsers have certain features that make them ideal. They take up less space, they're a LOT less bloated, they load faster, and in some cases, they're a lot less bug ridden.
You're just inviting the alternative, which is to only support IE5+ on Windows because that's 93%+ of the market share, and f**k the rest of the world.
The basic dichototmy is that Tim Berners-Lee (if you haven't heard of him, get someone else to moderate your comment down :-) was aiming for representation of the structure of the content in HTML, while leaving the presentation of that structure up to the browser.
Most websites are aiming to control the presentation, using bastardisations of the original intent of the standard like explicit font declarations and using TABLE tags to control layout (when did you last see TABLE used to present tabular data?). HTML is simply not suited to pixel level control of the display.
What we need going forward, and quickly, is a strong definition from a body like the W3C on a pixel-level rich content, fully interactive, client-server (not transactional like HTTP) standard that eveyrone can implement. The Web, Mark II. Obvious ideas would be basing it on applets or Flash.
Right now, the real risk is that the W3C is going to become toothless; the real standard now is not HTML-anything, it's "what works in IE and mostly ok in Netscape" and it will rapidly become "what works in IE" only. Projects like Mozilla will quickly become catch-up imitators of IE the way StarOffice is of MS-Office.