I don't actually run RAID, but I've gotten some interesting stories from some (more than 1) people who do.
I'll comment on this later...
The weakest drive fails first. Power down the RAID box to replace the bad drive...
OK, this is where I start getting dizzy. If their data is valuable enough to have RAID, why were they such cheap bastards that they didn't get hot-swap drives? I've worked in a LOT of places that have RAID systems, and three of my own servers have RAID, yet to date, none of them were anything but hot-swap. Additionally, with a small amount of intelligence and a few extra dollars, the administrator always puts in a hot-standby drive that will automatically take over if a drive fails, allowing for the failed drive to be replaced at a more convenient time than 1:30am without sacrificing the redundancy. Sysadmins running really critical systems will often have multiple hot-standby drives.
The stress of the power-down and restart is enough to kill the second-weakest drive.
Now, see, here's the funny part. When you spend the bucks for SCA hot-swap drives, you actually get drives of decent enough quality that this is very rarely a problem. Even if you did have to shut the array down, which you won't because you bought proper hardware.
enough so that they've quit using RAID as "backup"
Further evidence of idiocy. RAID is not a backup. RAID allows you to keep running in the event of a specific type of hardware failure. But that is all it protects you from. Backups are still just as critical as they were before you had RAID. Anyone who uses a RAID array instead of proper backups deserves to have their data sacrificed to the gods of entropy, shortly followed by their own careers.
As for my delayed comment on the first sentence... Well, I suggest you get smarter friends.
The larger the municipality, the more unlikely it is you will get the permits for it. However, in unincorporated land, you might not need any permit at all.
A *lot* of ISPs block incoming SMTP from residential/dialup/dynamic addresses. I sure as heck do. It cut my spam load by more then 50%, and not a single false-positive yet.
I was in the US Navy at the time, stationed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Any time the shuttle launched, it was usually on the hospital TVs. So, yes, I saw it live. Hospitals aren't particularly noisy places, but Bethesda is huge, so there's normally a pretty good level of background noise. You could have heard a pin drop in that place for most of that day.
ICANN was responsible for stopping that tactic. Verisign was the one responsible for implmenting it.
Now ICANN is getting bitten in the ass for making the right call. Verisign is suing them over that decision, and is using the lawsuit as a weapon to get further (non-competitive) control over.com and.net. (After an already questionable award giving them.net)
My biggest problem with ICANN is that Verisign has too much influence over them. Verisign needs to be nuked.
Disclaimer, I'm not a gamer. All I do with my systems is write software, edit occasional graphics, remotely administer other systems, and the other typical stuff.
Currently in use in my home/office:
Pentium Pro 200, 128MB RAM:iptables firewall, runs CentOS
386SX25, 8MB RAM (notebook) : portable console for accessing switch/router serial interfaces (using minicom), runs some ancient version of Slackware (one of those massive floppy installs)
Pentium III 350, 256MB RAM:file server, media server, runs CentOS. Just brought online this weekend to replace a dual PII machine (IDE drive interface was getting erratic)
Pentium III 800 (dual), 1GB RAM: my primary workstation, runs Win XP Pro.
All of my systems except the notebook are retired servers. I really hate wasting good equipment.
If you're Jack Thompson you probably also do d) File a lawsuit against the judge for dismissing you.
Even Jack can't do that. Judges have unconditional immunity from prosecution for all acts arising from their judicial authority. Even if the judge was being malicious, he can't be sued, only overruled.
Lawyers can only be sued for intentional/malicious malfeasance.
Other officers of the court have pretty much no immunity, even if there wasn't any improper intent.
Um, dude. These things aren't controlled by some slashdotter and an X-box. We're already talking about a situation where NASA would need *years* of advanced warning. I'm pretty sure that's enough time to program all the parameters into a computer, then let it carry out its instructions.
Time to get out of your mother's basement and realize life is not a video game.
Launching the craft. How much fuel would it take to get escape velocity on something this massive? Probably not a small amount.
Why would you launch it from earth??? It's just weight for weight's sake, so build it from stuff already in space, or at the very least, on the moon. Only the engines, control module, etc would need to be lifted from earth. My personal opinion would be to find a nearby asteroid or similar of the appropriate size, shape it as needed, and slap some thrusters on/in it.
The crew. The time the crew would be away from earth would be how long? 10 years? 20 years? Managing and provisioning crews for such a long amount of time is probably among the major challenges facing the extension of our space travel abilities.
What crew? Why on earth would you crew it? Remote operation should be just fine.
Coming home. What happens when a ship this large is re-entering Earth's atmosphere? That sucker will have a lot of force coming down.
OK, now you're just being stupid. What possible reason would there be for landing this contraption on earth?
Having done a bit of independent contracting and design work in the past, general rules of thumb:
If you were working on an existing product owned by the employer, copyright is theirs.
If you were working on a product substantially *designed* (not just spec'd) by the employer, copyright is theirs.
If you were working with a team of others hired by the company, or employees of the company, copyright is theirs.
If you were indistinguishable from an employee during your work (worked in their facilities, on their equipment, on their hours) it is generally considered "work for hire" and the copyright is theirs.
If you recieved specs, then designed and built the product on your own time, on your own property/systems, without constant direct oversight, then the copyrights are most likely yours, with a perpetual, non-exclusive license given to the employer.
That said, if you are relying on any of this without having it expressly written in your contract, you are a fool.
Your point about light trucks remaining the same weight is a good one, but it ignores the current elephant in the living room, SUVs. Light trucks served a different purpose 35 years ago; chiefly they were trucks. They were driven by experienced drivers, mostly for work, and nationwide they were far less common then cars.
You say you get the point, and yet you missed the point.
The point is, the same folks who are driving SUVs today, were driving Impalas, New Yorkers, Fairlanes, etc 30 years ago. Same weight, just a different form-factor. My dad had a big Ford station wagon we rode around in when I was a kid, it has to have out-weighed my wife's '93 Jeep Cherokee by at least 2,000 lbs. After that, we had a full-sized Ford van. You think SUV's are common now, but in the 70's and 80's, full-sized vans were quite common. Those vans were at *least* as big/heavy as today's SUV's.
Y;know, this makes it sound like light trucks are the evildoers here, but let's point out a few facts.
Fact: Light trucks haven't really gotten any bigger, and in fact may be slightly lighter in weight than previously. A 2005 1/2 ton pickup is pretty much the same size as a 1970 1/2 ton pickup.
Fact: Passenger cars have gotten a lot smaller over the past few decades. Even on the "large" end of the scale, a current model Cadillac is nowhere near the size of a 1972 Chrysler New Yorker. In fact, that '72 New Yorker probably outweighs a number of modern light trucks. Modern Impalas give me a fit of the giggles every time I see one.
When you look at it this way, it's not so much that the light trucks are at fault as it is that the current passenger cars are much more dangerous than their previous counterparts. Were those cars gas-guzzling behemoths? Yup, they sure were. But the tradoff for efficiency is less mass around the passengers, which equates to less safety when colliding with a larger vehicle.
Point is, in the '70s, larger passenger cars were pretty much on even footing with the light trucks. To point out that modern, smaller cars are more vulnerable against light trucks is pretty much like pointing out that getting hit in the head with a baseball is going to hurt more if you are wearing a cap vs. a batting helmet.
Not all of the root servers are *in* the US any more. The real pain would be that if the root servers fragment, each DNS server operator will have to decide which ones are "accurate", and change their hints file to only use those servers. Otherwise, you could get different answers for the same request, depending on which of the root servers your recursive server happened to use that time.
You're going into a natural disaster area, you don't know what you need, and rather than asking the Red Cross, FEMA, or any other group of experts, you decided that Slashdot was a good place to get advice????
Stay home. I'm pretty sure they already have more than their quota of stupid people.
Among other things, the forensics will show that it was the original drive, written over, not a replacement. If it was a replacement, you have the issue of wondering where the original went to.
adding all software should be free to use and that artists could be paid for their films and music by a general 'taxation' on Internet connections.
Ah yes, the "everyone should pay for my stuff" theory.
What about the very large number of people who *don't* download music? The small amount of music I buy, I prefer to have uncorrupted, on physical media.
I really don't see why I should be paying for other people's recreation, and I especially don't see why my money should be going to *crap* musicians/bands, since there's no question that money would be going to the big labels, not the independents.
I hate stored procedures, they may be useful when the DB designer has borked the design, but just redesign the damn thing already! There is no other sane use for them.
Which only shows that you don't work with very large projects, or ones where performance is an issue.
Fact: Stored procedures, being pre-compiled, perform significantly faster than ad-hoc queries.
Also fact, when you have several different applications performing the similar functions (trust me, happens a lot in large projects), it's a sure-fire way of making sure all apps are doing the same thing. Likewise, if something needs changing/optimizing, it can be changed in one place, instead of hunting down every place the functionality is performed.
The company I'm working for now is in the process of instituting *more* stored procedures, not fewer. Seems the previous developers weren't talented enough to figure out what they were good for or how to write them.
Actually, lawyers are pretty much immune from civil action for all but *intentional* misbehaviour in the performance of their duties as an officer of the court.
That's one of the perks you get when the peoiple who run the game are also the ones that wrote the rules.
vs that same guy now talking about how Apple "stands behind" its products.
Oh yeah, I always think favorably of companies that have to be forced to "stand behind" their products by a class-action suit. I mean, I positively glow when I talk about the generosity of the record labels back when the courts forced them to refund me a couple bucks after having overcharged me for years.
I would have been impressed if this had never reached any form of court proceeding. As it is, it's just typical corporate business as usual.
If I read the articles correctly, the local taxpayers asked the school district to sell the Laptops for cheap, since the local taxpayers already paid for the laptops.
Which is complete crap reasoning.
What really happened was a few taxpayers decided that *they* should get a gift at the expense of all of the other taxpayers. The only way it could have been fair was if every taxpayer in the county got one.
What should have happened was for the county to sell them at fair market value, and place that money into the treasury, thus maximizing the value of the taxpayer's dollars.
Mailing list servers would be heavily burdened sending a lot of email, but there are ways around that.
Really, what ways are those? I've yet to hear of one that actually makes sense. How about mail relays? I don't actually send my mail directly to end-servers, I have an SMTP server on my end that does it. Problem is, it does the same theing for a lot of other people too. I don't want to have to put in a supercomputer just to be able to forward mail to the next server.
Don't forget web-based mail systems. Same problem.
And last of all, factor in things like cell-phones and such that can send email that don't have huge processing power for doing expensive mathematical calculations.
See, there's a reason why systems like this haven't been put in place yet. The idea sounds good on paper, but sucks rocks in real life.
Sender pays still equates to receiver pays once you strip off the mumbo-jumbo.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't actually run RAID, but I've gotten some interesting stories from some (more than 1) people who do.
I'll comment on this later...
The weakest drive fails first. Power down the RAID box to replace the bad drive...
OK, this is where I start getting dizzy. If their data is valuable enough to have RAID, why were they such cheap bastards that they didn't get hot-swap drives? I've worked in a LOT of places that have RAID systems, and three of my own servers have RAID, yet to date, none of them were anything but hot-swap. Additionally, with a small amount of intelligence and a few extra dollars, the administrator always puts in a hot-standby drive that will automatically take over if a drive fails, allowing for the failed drive to be replaced at a more convenient time than 1:30am without sacrificing the redundancy. Sysadmins running really critical systems will often have multiple hot-standby drives.
The stress of the power-down and restart is enough to kill the second-weakest drive.
Now, see, here's the funny part. When you spend the bucks for SCA hot-swap drives, you actually get drives of decent enough quality that this is very rarely a problem. Even if you did have to shut the array down, which you won't because you bought proper hardware.
enough so that they've quit using RAID as "backup"
Further evidence of idiocy. RAID is not a backup. RAID allows you to keep running in the event of a specific type of hardware failure. But that is all it protects you from. Backups are still just as critical as they were before you had RAID. Anyone who uses a RAID array instead of proper backups deserves to have their data sacrificed to the gods of entropy, shortly followed by their own careers.
As for my delayed comment on the first sentence... Well, I suggest you get smarter friends.
It depends entirely on where you live.
The larger the municipality, the more unlikely it is you will get the permits for it. However, in unincorporated land, you might not need any permit at all.
How is it deception?
The officer has the right to ask, you have the right to say no.
Your point being?
A *lot* of ISPs block incoming SMTP from residential/dialup/dynamic addresses. I sure as heck do. It cut my spam load by more then 50%, and not a single false-positive yet.
I was in the US Navy at the time, stationed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Any time the shuttle launched, it was usually on the hospital TVs. So, yes, I saw it live. Hospitals aren't particularly noisy places, but Bethesda is huge, so there's normally a pretty good level of background noise. You could have heard a pin drop in that place for most of that day.
This is why it's illegal to deposit checks into someone else's bank account.
Cite please.
Whenever I deposit funds to my account, I'm never asked for ID.
When I withdraw funds, I am always asked for ID.
ICANN was responsible for stopping that tactic. Verisign was the one responsible for implmenting it.
.com and .net. (After an already questionable award giving them .net)
Now ICANN is getting bitten in the ass for making the right call. Verisign is suing them over that decision, and is using the lawsuit as a weapon to get further (non-competitive) control over
My biggest problem with ICANN is that Verisign has too much influence over them. Verisign needs to be nuked.
Disclaimer, I'm not a gamer. All I do with my systems is write software, edit occasional graphics, remotely administer other systems, and the other typical stuff.
:iptables firewall, runs CentOS
:file server, media server, runs CentOS. Just brought online this weekend to replace a dual PII machine (IDE drive interface was getting erratic)
Currently in use in my home/office:
Pentium Pro 200, 128MB RAM
386SX25, 8MB RAM (notebook) : portable console for accessing switch/router serial interfaces (using minicom), runs some ancient version of Slackware (one of those massive floppy installs)
Pentium III 350, 256MB RAM
Pentium III 800 (dual), 1GB RAM: my primary workstation, runs Win XP Pro.
All of my systems except the notebook are retired servers. I really hate wasting good equipment.
If you're Jack Thompson you probably also do d) File a lawsuit against the judge for dismissing you.
Even Jack can't do that. Judges have unconditional immunity from prosecution for all acts arising from their judicial authority. Even if the judge was being malicious, he can't be sued, only overruled.
Lawyers can only be sued for intentional/malicious malfeasance.
Other officers of the court have pretty much no immunity, even if there wasn't any improper intent.
Um, dude. These things aren't controlled by some slashdotter and an X-box. We're already talking about a situation where NASA would need *years* of advanced warning. I'm pretty sure that's enough time to program all the parameters into a computer, then let it carry out its instructions.
Time to get out of your mother's basement and realize life is not a video game.
Launching the craft. How much fuel would it take to get escape velocity on something this massive? Probably not a small amount.
Why would you launch it from earth??? It's just weight for weight's sake, so build it from stuff already in space, or at the very least, on the moon. Only the engines, control module, etc would need to be lifted from earth. My personal opinion would be to find a nearby asteroid or similar of the appropriate size, shape it as needed, and slap some thrusters on/in it.
The crew. The time the crew would be away from earth would be how long? 10 years? 20 years? Managing and provisioning crews for such a long amount of time is probably among the major challenges facing the extension of our space travel abilities.
What crew? Why on earth would you crew it? Remote operation should be just fine.
Coming home. What happens when a ship this large is re-entering Earth's atmosphere? That sucker will have a lot of force coming down.
OK, now you're just being stupid. What possible reason would there be for landing this contraption on earth?
Having done a bit of independent contracting and design work in the past, general rules of thumb:
If you were working on an existing product owned by the employer, copyright is theirs.
If you were working on a product substantially *designed* (not just spec'd) by the employer, copyright is theirs.
If you were working with a team of others hired by the company, or employees of the company, copyright is theirs.
If you were indistinguishable from an employee during your work (worked in their facilities, on their equipment, on their hours) it is generally considered "work for hire" and the copyright is theirs.
If you recieved specs, then designed and built the product on your own time, on your own property/systems, without constant direct oversight, then the copyrights are most likely yours, with a perpetual, non-exclusive license given to the employer.
That said, if you are relying on any of this without having it expressly written in your contract, you are a fool.
Your point about light trucks remaining the same weight is a good one, but it ignores the current elephant in the living room, SUVs. Light trucks served a different purpose 35 years ago; chiefly they were trucks. They were driven by experienced drivers, mostly for work, and nationwide they were far less common then cars.
You say you get the point, and yet you missed the point.
The point is, the same folks who are driving SUVs today, were driving Impalas, New Yorkers, Fairlanes, etc 30 years ago. Same weight, just a different form-factor. My dad had a big Ford station wagon we rode around in when I was a kid, it has to have out-weighed my wife's '93 Jeep Cherokee by at least 2,000 lbs. After that, we had a full-sized Ford van. You think SUV's are common now, but in the 70's and 80's, full-sized vans were quite common. Those vans were at *least* as big/heavy as today's SUV's.
Y;know, this makes it sound like light trucks are the evildoers here, but let's point out a few facts.
Fact: Light trucks haven't really gotten any bigger, and in fact may be slightly lighter in weight than previously. A 2005 1/2 ton pickup is pretty much the same size as a 1970 1/2 ton pickup.
Fact: Passenger cars have gotten a lot smaller over the past few decades. Even on the "large" end of the scale, a current model Cadillac is nowhere near the size of a 1972 Chrysler New Yorker. In fact, that '72 New Yorker probably outweighs a number of modern light trucks. Modern Impalas give me a fit of the giggles every time I see one.
When you look at it this way, it's not so much that the light trucks are at fault as it is that the current passenger cars are much more dangerous than their previous counterparts. Were those cars gas-guzzling behemoths? Yup, they sure were. But the tradoff for efficiency is less mass around the passengers, which equates to less safety when colliding with a larger vehicle.
Point is, in the '70s, larger passenger cars were pretty much on even footing with the light trucks. To point out that modern, smaller cars are more vulnerable against light trucks is pretty much like pointing out that getting hit in the head with a baseball is going to hurt more if you are wearing a cap vs. a batting helmet.
Um, dude?
Not all of the root servers are *in* the US any more. The real pain would be that if the root servers fragment, each DNS server operator will have to decide which ones are "accurate", and change their hints file to only use those servers. Otherwise, you could get different answers for the same request, depending on which of the root servers your recursive server happened to use that time.
Let me get this straight...
You're going into a natural disaster area, you don't know what you need, and rather than asking the Red Cross, FEMA, or any other group of experts, you decided that Slashdot was a good place to get advice????
Stay home. I'm pretty sure they already have more than their quota of stupid people.
Talk about a show before it's time. Max Headroom's one of the few shows from many years ago I can watch today without it feeling extremely dated.
Yeah, I liked the original Star Trek, but truthfully, I can't watch it anymore. It just seems so... well, old.
Among other things, the forensics will show that it was the original drive, written over, not a replacement. If it was a replacement, you have the issue of wondering where the original went to.
adding all software should be free to use and that artists could be paid for their films and music by a general 'taxation' on Internet connections.
Ah yes, the "everyone should pay for my stuff" theory.
What about the very large number of people who *don't* download music? The small amount of music I buy, I prefer to have uncorrupted, on physical media.
I really don't see why I should be paying for other people's recreation, and I especially don't see why my money should be going to *crap* musicians/bands, since there's no question that money would be going to the big labels, not the independents.
I hate stored procedures, they may be useful when the DB designer has borked the design, but just redesign the damn thing already! There is no other sane use for them.
Which only shows that you don't work with very large projects, or ones where performance is an issue.
Fact: Stored procedures, being pre-compiled, perform significantly faster than ad-hoc queries.
Also fact, when you have several different applications performing the similar functions (trust me, happens a lot in large projects), it's a sure-fire way of making sure all apps are doing the same thing. Likewise, if something needs changing/optimizing, it can be changed in one place, instead of hunting down every place the functionality is performed.
The company I'm working for now is in the process of instituting *more* stored procedures, not fewer. Seems the previous developers weren't talented enough to figure out what they were good for or how to write them.
The man needs anger management therapy, not a physical assault.
I miss the days when those two concepts were not considered mutually exclusive.
Sometimes, what people like this need really *is* a thump upside the head.
Actually, lawyers are pretty much immune from civil action for all but *intentional* misbehaviour in the performance of their duties as an officer of the court.
That's one of the perks you get when the peoiple who run the game are also the ones that wrote the rules.
vs that same guy now talking about how Apple "stands behind" its products.
Oh yeah, I always think favorably of companies that have to be forced to "stand behind" their products by a class-action suit. I mean, I positively glow when I talk about the generosity of the record labels back when the courts forced them to refund me a couple bucks after having overcharged me for years.
I would have been impressed if this had never reached any form of court proceeding. As it is, it's just typical corporate business as usual.
If I read the articles correctly, the local taxpayers asked the school district to sell the Laptops for cheap, since the local taxpayers already paid for the laptops.
Which is complete crap reasoning.
What really happened was a few taxpayers decided that *they* should get a gift at the expense of all of the other taxpayers. The only way it could have been fair was if every taxpayer in the county got one.
What should have happened was for the county to sell them at fair market value, and place that money into the treasury, thus maximizing the value of the taxpayer's dollars.
Mailing list servers would be heavily burdened sending a lot of email, but there are ways around that.
Really, what ways are those? I've yet to hear of one that actually makes sense. How about mail relays? I don't actually send my mail directly to end-servers, I have an SMTP server on my end that does it. Problem is, it does the same theing for a lot of other people too. I don't want to have to put in a supercomputer just to be able to forward mail to the next server.
Don't forget web-based mail systems. Same problem.
And last of all, factor in things like cell-phones and such that can send email that don't have huge processing power for doing expensive mathematical calculations.
See, there's a reason why systems like this haven't been put in place yet. The idea sounds good on paper, but sucks rocks in real life.
Sender pays still equates to receiver pays once you strip off the mumbo-jumbo.