heh, whoops, my bad. I guess I need to read slower.
I'd like one of those FW flash drives to play around with, but for right now, the USB ones are a much better deal.
I'd also be interested to see what the boot speed of a flash drive is, compared to a hard drive. There seems to be quite a variety of different speeds of flash memory, (just TRY and find what speed a flash drive's memory really is without opening the package!) and in that case I'd want top of the lline flash chips.
I suppose those extender cables are fine for people that need to hook them up to their computer, but I travel a campus of about 350 machines and some of them are anything but "easy access". It's never fun having to pull out a powermac g4 from deep inside a cubbyhole full of dust bunnies and the usual assortment of stuffed animals, books, papers, and trash, only to unplug half the cords by pulling it out far enough to find the usb port, and spend the next 5 minutes wrestling it to get the cables back in again.
Oh, and a real bonus of that situation is if you have a firewire cable instead of a flash drive. Did you know if you can't see the port, you can plug those cables in wrong? (specifically, into a 4-handled G3 or G4, which has a split in its firewire port guard, which will allow the FW plug in backwards if even a small amount of force is used) Bad Things(tm) happen when you do that btw.
Quote me how then please? I have been looking, and so far as I can tell, OS X hard resets all USB buses about 1.5 seconds into boot. I've already tried it, dittoing a minimal OS X install onto my flash drive, and it gets about 6 lines into verbose boot, then you see the fateful message of it resetting the USB buses, and that's as far as she gets. Same for USB hard drives.
So to boot OS X off USB, you will have to modify the kernel to not reset the USB bus the root volume is on. (unless I've missed something?)
yes the firewire ones are bootable. unfortunately they are a great deal more expensive, lower top capacity, and not as many computers have firewire ports as usb ports. But give it a couple years and I'm sure that will all change. Also, usb 2.0HS (theoretically anyway, speed=480) can outrun FW400. Though I'd be interested to see the USB2.0HS flash drives get into a match with the FW400 drives and see who comes out on top for the long-haul copies.
could be secure, sure. But that's what the man at the front desk said. If you are worried about what computer to trust, why do you take HIS word? Saying the computer is secure is fine if you have control over it and know from personal experience that it is secure. But this is like a hotek keosk, not your bedroom. You don't own the machine, you didn't install the hardware or pull the memory. It's sitting at that bios screen when you boot it... who's to say that's not a program that's running? Is there really no hard drive? (being in a hotel, you can almost bet it will have one-way nuts or rivots for case screws, so no peeking either) How complicated of a hardware hack would it be to tap into the bus and log all memory traffic to disk? Or just plain duplicate your entire flash drive as soon as you plug it in? Emulators even have an easy time pulling stunts like this. (which is why we have that silly "press ctrl-alt-del to login" nonsense, to make sure that login screen isn't a keylogger on an already logged in machine)
The whole concept of a trusted system relies on having complete control over all imoprtant aspects of the system, and if joe cool at the front desk is supplying the computer, you've already lost.
There are "spare" cells in flash drives just the same as there are "spare" blocks on hard drives. There are usually two controller chips in a USB drive (plus the flash chips) - they include the memory controller and a usb (or firewire if you happen to have one) bridge. The memory controller manages the memory and remaps cells that go bad, transparent to the usb/fw bridge. Anyone with a flash drive probably has some bad cells in it, just like hard drives 10 years ago that came with a label printed on the top listing all the bad blocks the new drive shipped with.
Parent talks about "wear balancing" - interesting concept though I have not heard of it used on flash drives before... would be a nice idea but not too fun to implement.
I use my flash drive several times a day at least, it's a 4gb SanDisk Cruzer Mini. Perfect for hauling around all the maintenance, repair, and update software that I use daily. I don't know why people buy those giant drives that don't fit well in a pocket and block adjacent USB ports. SanDisk also has a lifetime guarantee on their drives, so if mine ever does use up all its spares, I'll just trade it for a new one. Lacks a write protect switch though, which would kinda be nice.
Also a less known factoid about USB drives... the fast ones - USB 2.0 "High Speed" (not to be confused with the "Full Speed" snails) only work in powered USB hubs. Can't plug them into the keyboard ports. I wish they'd fix that. I'm tired of having to crawl behind a computer to jack into one of the powered ports. Thankfully most manufacturers are placing a powered usb port on the front of their machines nowadays. (sometimes two)
Would be nice too if Apple would fix OS X so it didn't reset all the #@*& USB buses 1.5 seconds into boot, so we could boot X off our flash drives.
Won't get very far. Usually I watch my DVDs once normally, then once through with the director's commentary if available, then maybe once more to get a second look at the special effects. That's just one viewing as far as I can tell. I don't think I own a DVD I have not watched at least half a dozen times. And I don't have a particularly large collection compared to many - just one large CD wallet about 1/2 full.
About two years ago I saw a show that was showing off a new anti sniper tech. It was a very high speed digital camera attached to a computer. It actually looked for bullets, flying through the air. When it found one, it would trace the trajectory, usually seeing the bullet 3-6 times in all, and plot a reverse course which in theory should cross through the point of origin. (the gun)
There was no weaponry attached, it was merely a computer screen to show the bullets as captured, overlaid on the live view, along with drawing a line showing reverse trajectory. The men in the field still had to interperet it and spot the sniper and deal with him.
I assume this is the next step of evolution of the system I saw back then. Should have been sufficiently technologically challenging, though I suppose if you could get a more 3-d idea of where the bulllets were, (which would be possible with two cameras I suppose) then use laser rangefinding to calculate distance as you sweep across the reverse trajectory, you should be able to calculate how far away the bullet is from you at any given point in the sweep, and when that number intersects with the laser range finder's distance reading, unless you have crossed an obstacle, there's your target. Actually I suppose it would need an exact match, because if the LRF was showing several feet shorter distance, then you're probably passing an obstacle that's between you and the course of the bullet. It's probably using some variation on that simple idea.
So we don't quite have a defense drone a la Aliens, but it's not a bad idea for somewhere that you are expecting trouble.
Problem with snipers is, if they are halfway decent, after the first shot they've already won and it's not going to help much to shoot back.
REALLY cool would be a gun that shoots lead slugs (like safety slugs, lightly jacketed powered lead) and could take bullets out of the air, Patriot Missile style. That's probably more than a few years out though.
There are very few aircraft that can take off OR land purely automatically, and to my knowledge, they are all model aircraft, the largest being a miniature helicopter used for observing volcanoes. Even the Predator, the US military's premier unmanned craft, cannot land or take off completely automatically. I dont' think anything anywhere near as sophisticated as an Airbus can do that. Taking off is diffcult, landing is very difficult. (ask any pilot, landing and takeoff are absolutely the most dangerous maneuvers they ever get to make) To just hold SLF (straight and level flight) is cake by comparison, and that's about all they use autopilots for.
I recall seeing a demonstration of what happened the last time they tried that technology, it's been several years now. 13 crew aboard the demo 747 (or something of that size, I don't recall exactly) all died iirc. They were trying to take off, and the enhanced autopilot decided they were trying to land and took over, so it got about 100ft off the ground and started heading back down, off the end of the runway and into a forest. Nice large fireball too.
The question then becomes, what is the value of employee loyalty, and what is the cost of being good to your employees? (and which is greater?)
On one hand you can be good to your employees... give them notice of pending termination, replace bad management, give employees flexibility. This does increase productivity usually, but can also in some respects lower productivity as employees may feel it is not necessary to work so hard at what they do because no one is riding their case. The problem here is certain "nice" things you can do will expose your company to substancial risks. The one being discussed above was the employee that goes postal on the system when they hear they're gone in two weeks.
On the other hand you can be a tyrant. Axe people with no warning, be draconian on sick leave, penalize tardiness, etc etc. This lowers moral, and may for reasons opposite of those above, raise OR lower productivity.
So the only difference that unbalances these two options, is that risk you take by being nice. No matter how nice you are, eventually you have to can people. Usually the reasons for canning them are directly related to the risks you take BY canning them. (mentally unstable, does not respect authority, short-sighted, vengeful, etc) This is even more the case if you are tolerant, where you might keep people that have minor issues, but finally you have to dump someone that is a serious problem. Eventually you have to terminate people. Leaving yourself open to retribution will eventually bite you, it's only a matter of time. It could be "oopsie, does anyone know what the new root password is on the firewall?" Or it could be "has anyone seen the backup for the customer database?... the one on the server appears to have gotten corrupted somehow..."
Something that goes well with this is the proverbial "be good to the clerk". In any organization of any reasonable size, there are a group of unappreciated, poorly-paid people that do menial work. But often that work is essential to the operation of the company, and quite often this is because they do something trivial that is also essential to your being able to do your job, or makes your work much easier for you to do.
These are the people that idiots and managers walk on all the time. Of all the people to have permanently pissed at you, these are the worst. I'd rather have the owner not like me than his secretary.
Being on good terms with these people gives you so many benefits that it's ridiculous. They have 50 people that need something. If you are on good terms with them, you can get that something whenever you want, put yourself at the front of their queue. When you get to know them, they may even anticipate your needs and adjust their schedule ever so slightly to help you. Not everyone in this position works that way, but many do, and they are quite happy to put in a little extra effort to those that treat them civially. I'm not saying to take advantage of them, but you can work smoother with anyone you are getting along with, and these are actually very important people to have a good working relationship with. Spending 2 minutes chatting with one of these peopel at lunch could translate into them spending 10 seconds of their afternoon looking through the stack of paper with your name on it to do first, advancing your schedule by maybe an hour. Being good to these people can pay you back in spades.
I have seen this effect work in my favor and to the favor of those that I know on many occaions. Secretaries, receptionists, janitors, maintenance staff... all underappreciated and often grateful to those that show them respect or even basic acknowledgement that they are just not used to getting from anyone.
My canned response in those discussions now is "I will give you at least as much notice when I leave as I expect to get if I am to be laid off or fired." This usually ends the conversaion, as most management is not prepared to shovel on the BS thick enough to counter that point. So far none of them have even asked me to clarify for them how long that period is. I assume they feel that means no notice?
In the I.T. business though, in most cases, management takes the ultra-paranoid approach. They take your card at the door and hand you a box of your belongings and a manilla envelope containing your last paycheck, information on company policy, cobra, and how to file for unemployment. Again I see this as very rude and unfair to the worker, but a wise move for the employer. There's always going to be that 1% that "goes postal" on the databases if you give him notice, and they are just trying to protect themselves from this hazard. If the employee is even a little bit mental and knows he can do 50x the damage to the company in the next 2 minutes than the company could ever recover from him in damages, he just might do it for spite's sake. If he's already in bad financial shape and you're about to take away his income, you'd better hope that either he's stable or you're prepared, because he may not have much to lose.
Employers don't see this behavior as having any negative side-effect to the company. Sure they're shafting someone, but that someone can't do anything to you anymore. It won't affect their productivity since they are no longer working for you. And the remaining employees are mostly taking the attitude that they wouldn't do that to me, or simply believing that they will never be fired or laid off and have to run that risk to begin with. If the company has nothing to lose by doing it, or everything to risk by NOT doing it, it just makes sense. Unfortunate, but it is probably the smartest thing for them to do.
(oh, if you work somewhere with a severence package, count yourself lucky... they don't become common until you get into a fairly high income bracket)
Summarizing that, A. the company expects loyalty from their workers, yet B. the company rarely if ever demonstrates loyalty to the worker. This behavior is not really deceitful or contrary, it's good business sense. Take advantage of everyone you can (including and especially your own employees) as far as you can to maximize proffit. If people are getting too pissed off and turnover is too high, you're probably pulling a little too hard on your staff. If proffits are minimal but your staff don't have a care in the world, you are probably letting them off a bit too easy for your company's good. Every company has their own point of maximum proffit. Telemarketing for example, seems to have a very low point and most employees are treated like last week's newspaper - worth very little, easily replaced with something better, and quickly discarded and forgotten about.
One of my favorite examples is that companies expect a 2 week notice (minimum, they seem to want a 2 year notice?) when you are going to quit. Just TRY and get them to agree to giving YOU a two week notice before they can you. First they laugh at the idea because they just consider it totally absurd. Then they wince and realize you have a valid point, and finally they frown as they realize they have absolutely no moral grounds to ask you to give notice, and there's absolutely nothing they can do to you after you carry through on said plan. I've had that conversation now with two employers, and it's interesting to watch them try to say with a straight face that no, we will not give you notice, but it's YOUR moral obligation to give US notice.
Another good point that has thus far been missed is that sometimes the company can't be loyal to you. I worked a telemarketing firm, and through my skill and tendency to take over projects that were being bungled and fix them, I put myself in a somewhat "irreplaceable" position - one of the employees that is the only one that knows how to properly do several essential things in an organization, which refuses to allow time to train more people on how to do your job. This was good for job security, so I thought, until the location I worked at closed its doors suddenly one Wednesday afternoon. Oops! "Irreplaceable" does not always translate to "job security". Never forget you are a pawn, and in the end will always be treated as such. If not by your manager, then by your NEXT manager, or by HIS manager.
Was the map that was distributed an actual scaled down copy of the actual map this group was publishing, or was it an interpretation of the map? I can see them having a problem with distributing a copy of their map, but if it's merely a new drawing of the same map, then it probably falls into the "public knowledge" domain. You can copywrite a drawing, but you cannot claim copyright over all new drawings of the same item you drew. At least not when it's a publicly accessible thing such as a transit system.
There should also be a cap to legal expense reimbursement. Say you are joe sixpack that sues Totota because your airbag didn't deploy. They send an army of 20 high paid lawyers out to basically smother you. Unless the judge is really on the ball and does an excellent job of protecting your rights, (while remaining impartial) you will lose. Then you get to pay 20 lawyers what, $50,000 each? wheeeee...
Maybe set the limit on reimbursement to be say, double what your legal fees were. Hire a hometown lawyer and spend maybe $3500 on legal fees, then if you lose it still hurts ($7000) but it doesn't chapter 11 you.
The problem with that solution is twofold. Already beaten ad-anusium is the issue of two clients collaborating to cheat, which cannot really be compensated for.
The other issue less addressed is bandwidth. The tracker is the one weak link in BT, and if you recall back a year or so ago there was a problem with the trackers where they would send data on ALL peers, to all peers. (trackers now cap at 50 entries, randomly selected usually) This bug caused swarms that doubled in size to quadruple tracker traffic, because now there's 2x the peers, each requesting 2x the data. (so 2x the peers = 4x the traffic) This brought several large swarms to their knees as the trackers buckled under the weight.
Increasing the traffic between the client and the tracker, especially to this extent, would be devastating to BT. Right now all they report is data up and data down. That's like two numbers. Now imagine you're in a swarm and connected to say... 60 peers. That's 60 ups and 60 downs. Anyone can see that is an insane increase in traffic.
Right now things are set up correctly - the main enforcement on leeching is peer to peer review. You don't send me data? I'm not going to send you very much. This is traffic between peers, not between peers and the tracker, which is the best way to manage any distributed system.
In my case it's on a macintosh (not windows nor linux) so sometimes I have as much problems with drivers as you do on linux. I'm looking for a nice self-contained unit that has just the one port to connect to, for maximum portability. High speed is not as important as data protection or portability. I don't think I am ready to assemble my own NAS box either, so the best bet for me right now looks like one of these mini raid5 boxes. One of the machines I'd like to cable up to is a laptop, so an external sata interface is out. I don't care much for USB even though I know 2.0HS is easily on equal footing with FW400, so I would prefer a firewire solution over USB. (use what you're comfortable with in this case)
Those use quite a few more drives than I require, but worth looking into. Shame they have no prices on their web site, will have to give them a ring on Monday and see what they can do.
In my brief browse I didn't see a big writeup on what those enclosures can do, though I did find several good descriptions of what those 5-bay units I found can do. They seem to do everything we need... firewire 800, no controller card, hot swap, hot rebuild, and though I wouldn't trust it... hot grow. That feature set has been going for $3500-ish a year ago, so it's really come down in price lately, which is why we're in the market.
Unfortunately this is a charitable organization. In other words, money is unfortunately a factor. Looking for the best protection for the buck. Right now a RAID is looking like the best way to go, as there is a bit too much data to cost-effectively back up. The current upgrade is a result of a DOUBLE failure on a mirror, which very nearly tanked 250gb of data. (you don't EVEN want to know what I had to go through to get the drive that still spun to mount back up...)
If we can get the cabinet cheap enough, we will be able to buy a fresh set of 5 drives for it instead of recycling our current drives, and can break the mirrors and use their drives for offiste backup. But that's a big "if" right now.
In a perfect world, money would not be a factor, but it's not, so it is.
I've already got a pair of 8 bay towers, same design as your link but beige instead of black. Been using them as software mirrors, which has worked in the past but is becoming very cumbersome. I just was hit with a DOUBLE drive failure that very nearly cost me 250gb of data, so I am looking for a RAID5 self-contained solution. I could really use the improved efficiency of usable space in raid5 - 80% on a 5 drive system, as opposed to 50% on my mirrors. I also want a box that I stuff drives into, and plug one firewire cable into and it looks like a giant HD, with raid5 protection. This will allow me to move the array to another machine when needed. Can't hook it to my laptop if it requires a controller card!
These buggers are hard to find for anywhere near decent cash. I've found one model that is fairly popular, going by several different names and brands, but nobody seems to have them in stock. They look like a GREAT deal and loaded with most or alll of the best features of raid5. (hot swap, live rebuild, live GROW, etc) Has anyone seen one IN STOCK anywhere?
Everyone I call says they have them in stock. Then I ask them to check and they suddenly change their mind and say no it's not really in stock, (despite what their web page says) and they expect it in the generic "1-2 weeks". (retail-speak for "we don't know when it'll be in, please call back later")
Two of them actually told me they have yet to receive any of these units, so I don't think they've shipped from the manufacturer yet? (vaporware?)
A company I used to work for, a fair size place with 6 offices and about 500 employees, didn't care much for me bringing my laptop into work. About every four months my manager would start grumbling that I really shouldn't do that. By some random chance however, each time things were getting despirate, some special need would come up that necessitated my laptop. (there were no company laptops) My machine also had a good hunk of HD space free, scsi with disk recovery tools, and lots of other handy things. Being a mac, it could also convert obscure file formats we would occasionally receive from a client. And that would reset my harassement level back to normal, and the cycle would start over. This went on for the better part of two years.
Ironically, the company was technologically in the dark ages. My laptop was hands-down the fastest machine in the building, and had more storage space on its built-in drive than any single fileserver we owned. (heh, though my lappy didn't have raid...)
The biggest problem we actually had was the windows users bringing in floppies. No, not the regular employees... the IT staff. We used floppies for data backup of stats files, and on at least three occasions I had to go on a "NYB hunt" and flush NYB off probably 1/3 of our stats floppies. (about 100) I suspect the same person on each event. Fortunately that one had a very obvious side effect that made it easy to spot - a system with NYB resident could not format floppies. (it survives ctrl-alt-delete too, irritating bugger, you must cold boot)
PCs may have a death grip on the business scene, but they could do a world of good toward solving the security issue by using powerbooks for their portables. Almost zero risk of getting a virus into the company from it even with the most reckless behavior, and arguably a better portable in any event. (call me a troll if you simply just hate macs, but you must admit I have a valid point!)
Some of that is justifiable. You don't give a 4 year old a set of sharp scissors to cut his construction paper, you give him a set of those stamped safety scissors. But then YOU aren't going to use those safety scissors are you? Of course not.
Here I sit, drinking a tall glass of milk, setting it down 5" from my laptop. I would never advise an 'average user' to do this, because average users are klutzes and when they dump a can of pepsi into their laptop's keyboard I'll be the one that gets to fix it, so I will say "no food around computers" and proceed to pour another tall glass of milk.
It's not hypocracy, it's "who is responsible enough for the privledge". And with no background history to go on, all users are by default considered klutzes and do not have food or drink anywhere near the computer.
Now if a user sees an IT person drinking a cup of coffee at their console they sometimes will flip out and cry foul, "why can't I do that?" But then again little kids will whine equally when they see their older brother with the "real scissors" and they get handed the chrome safeties. Doesn't mean the little tike should get the sharp ones now does it? It's not being unfair, it's just a matter of risk management.
It's also not a matter of playing favorites. A good friend of mine is a klutz. It's very rare to spend 20 minutes around him and NOT see him drop something. I would not advise him to eat around his computer either.
Anyway, enough about eating around computers, the concept extends to any other risky behavior around computers really, in much the same way.
I thought you could not (successfully) sue for libel or slander if what was said was true? (and isn't there also a window of opportunity for posting opinions, as long as they are plainly stated as opinion and not statement of fact?)
Hard to say for sure. I know I work on all my own hardware and have been working with mos and cmos down to chip assembly for better than what... well, working with electronics in general for over 25 years so before mos/cmos was even around, and never popped a chip, never had a chip fail later either. Ya if you're reckless you'll zap something but it takes a lot less paranoia to protect against most static issues than a lot of people realize.
It's like the people that are afraid to drive their car up a curb. OK maybe there is a remote risk, but good lord man, loosen up a little.
Slashdot Mirror
heh, whoops, my bad. I guess I need to read slower.
I'd like one of those FW flash drives to play around with, but for right now, the USB ones are a much better deal.
I'd also be interested to see what the boot speed of a flash drive is, compared to a hard drive. There seems to be quite a variety of different speeds of flash memory, (just TRY and find what speed a flash drive's memory really is without opening the package!) and in that case I'd want top of the lline flash chips.
I suppose those extender cables are fine for people that need to hook them up to their computer, but I travel a campus of about 350 machines and some of them are anything but "easy access". It's never fun having to pull out a powermac g4 from deep inside a cubbyhole full of dust bunnies and the usual assortment of stuffed animals, books, papers, and trash, only to unplug half the cords by pulling it out far enough to find the usb port, and spend the next 5 minutes wrestling it to get the cables back in again.
Oh, and a real bonus of that situation is if you have a firewire cable instead of a flash drive. Did you know if you can't see the port, you can plug those cables in wrong? (specifically, into a 4-handled G3 or G4, which has a split in its firewire port guard, which will allow the FW plug in backwards if even a small amount of force is used) Bad Things(tm) happen when you do that btw.
Quote me how then please? I have been looking, and so far as I can tell, OS X hard resets all USB buses about 1.5 seconds into boot. I've already tried it, dittoing a minimal OS X install onto my flash drive, and it gets about 6 lines into verbose boot, then you see the fateful message of it resetting the USB buses, and that's as far as she gets. Same for USB hard drives.
So to boot OS X off USB, you will have to modify the kernel to not reset the USB bus the root volume is on. (unless I've missed something?)
yes the firewire ones are bootable. unfortunately they are a great deal more expensive, lower top capacity, and not as many computers have firewire ports as usb ports. But give it a couple years and I'm sure that will all change. Also, usb 2.0HS (theoretically anyway, speed=480) can outrun FW400. Though I'd be interested to see the USB2.0HS flash drives get into a match with the FW400 drives and see who comes out on top for the long-haul copies.
could be secure, sure. But that's what the man at the front desk said. If you are worried about what computer to trust, why do you take HIS word? Saying the computer is secure is fine if you have control over it and know from personal experience that it is secure. But this is like a hotek keosk, not your bedroom. You don't own the machine, you didn't install the hardware or pull the memory. It's sitting at that bios screen when you boot it... who's to say that's not a program that's running? Is there really no hard drive? (being in a hotel, you can almost bet it will have one-way nuts or rivots for case screws, so no peeking either) How complicated of a hardware hack would it be to tap into the bus and log all memory traffic to disk? Or just plain duplicate your entire flash drive as soon as you plug it in? Emulators even have an easy time pulling stunts like this. (which is why we have that silly "press ctrl-alt-del to login" nonsense, to make sure that login screen isn't a keylogger on an already logged in machine)
The whole concept of a trusted system relies on having complete control over all imoprtant aspects of the system, and if joe cool at the front desk is supplying the computer, you've already lost.
There are "spare" cells in flash drives just the same as there are "spare" blocks on hard drives. There are usually two controller chips in a USB drive (plus the flash chips) - they include the memory controller and a usb (or firewire if you happen to have one) bridge. The memory controller manages the memory and remaps cells that go bad, transparent to the usb/fw bridge. Anyone with a flash drive probably has some bad cells in it, just like hard drives 10 years ago that came with a label printed on the top listing all the bad blocks the new drive shipped with.
Parent talks about "wear balancing" - interesting concept though I have not heard of it used on flash drives before... would be a nice idea but not too fun to implement.
I use my flash drive several times a day at least, it's a 4gb SanDisk Cruzer Mini. Perfect for hauling around all the maintenance, repair, and update software that I use daily. I don't know why people buy those giant drives that don't fit well in a pocket and block adjacent USB ports. SanDisk also has a lifetime guarantee on their drives, so if mine ever does use up all its spares, I'll just trade it for a new one. Lacks a write protect switch though, which would kinda be nice.
Also a less known factoid about USB drives... the fast ones - USB 2.0 "High Speed" (not to be confused with the "Full Speed" snails) only work in powered USB hubs. Can't plug them into the keyboard ports. I wish they'd fix that. I'm tired of having to crawl behind a computer to jack into one of the powered ports. Thankfully most manufacturers are placing a powered usb port on the front of their machines nowadays. (sometimes two)
Would be nice too if Apple would fix OS X so it didn't reset all the #@*& USB buses 1.5 seconds into boot, so we could boot X off our flash drives.
Won't get very far. Usually I watch my DVDs once normally, then once through with the director's commentary if available, then maybe once more to get a second look at the special effects. That's just one viewing as far as I can tell. I don't think I own a DVD I have not watched at least half a dozen times. And I don't have a particularly large collection compared to many - just one large CD wallet about 1/2 full.
This will flop. badly.
About two years ago I saw a show that was showing off a new anti sniper tech. It was a very high speed digital camera attached to a computer. It actually looked for bullets, flying through the air. When it found one, it would trace the trajectory, usually seeing the bullet 3-6 times in all, and plot a reverse course which in theory should cross through the point of origin. (the gun)
There was no weaponry attached, it was merely a computer screen to show the bullets as captured, overlaid on the live view, along with drawing a line showing reverse trajectory. The men in the field still had to interperet it and spot the sniper and deal with him.
I assume this is the next step of evolution of the system I saw back then. Should have been sufficiently technologically challenging, though I suppose if you could get a more 3-d idea of where the bulllets were, (which would be possible with two cameras I suppose) then use laser rangefinding to calculate distance as you sweep across the reverse trajectory, you should be able to calculate how far away the bullet is from you at any given point in the sweep, and when that number intersects with the laser range finder's distance reading, unless you have crossed an obstacle, there's your target. Actually I suppose it would need an exact match, because if the LRF was showing several feet shorter distance, then you're probably passing an obstacle that's between you and the course of the bullet. It's probably using some variation on that simple idea.
So we don't quite have a defense drone a la Aliens, but it's not a bad idea for somewhere that you are expecting trouble.
Problem with snipers is, if they are halfway decent, after the first shot they've already won and it's not going to help much to shoot back.
REALLY cool would be a gun that shoots lead slugs (like safety slugs, lightly jacketed powered lead) and could take bullets out of the air, Patriot Missile style. That's probably more than a few years out though.
There are very few aircraft that can take off OR land purely automatically, and to my knowledge, they are all model aircraft, the largest being a miniature helicopter used for observing volcanoes. Even the Predator, the US military's premier unmanned craft, cannot land or take off completely automatically. I dont' think anything anywhere near as sophisticated as an Airbus can do that. Taking off is diffcult, landing is very difficult. (ask any pilot, landing and takeoff are absolutely the most dangerous maneuvers they ever get to make) To just hold SLF (straight and level flight) is cake by comparison, and that's about all they use autopilots for.
I recall seeing a demonstration of what happened the last time they tried that technology, it's been several years now. 13 crew aboard the demo 747 (or something of that size, I don't recall exactly) all died iirc. They were trying to take off, and the enhanced autopilot decided they were trying to land and took over, so it got about 100ft off the ground and started heading back down, off the end of the runway and into a forest. Nice large fireball too.
Lets leave the flying to the humans for now.
The question then becomes, what is the value of employee loyalty, and what is the cost of being good to your employees? (and which is greater?)
On one hand you can be good to your employees... give them notice of pending termination, replace bad management, give employees flexibility. This does increase productivity usually, but can also in some respects lower productivity as employees may feel it is not necessary to work so hard at what they do because no one is riding their case. The problem here is certain "nice" things you can do will expose your company to substancial risks. The one being discussed above was the employee that goes postal on the system when they hear they're gone in two weeks.
On the other hand you can be a tyrant. Axe people with no warning, be draconian on sick leave, penalize tardiness, etc etc. This lowers moral, and may for reasons opposite of those above, raise OR lower productivity.
So the only difference that unbalances these two options, is that risk you take by being nice. No matter how nice you are, eventually you have to can people. Usually the reasons for canning them are directly related to the risks you take BY canning them. (mentally unstable, does not respect authority, short-sighted, vengeful, etc) This is even more the case if you are tolerant, where you might keep people that have minor issues, but finally you have to dump someone that is a serious problem. Eventually you have to terminate people. Leaving yourself open to retribution will eventually bite you, it's only a matter of time. It could be "oopsie, does anyone know what the new root password is on the firewall?" Or it could be "has anyone seen the backup for the customer database?... the one on the server appears to have gotten corrupted somehow..."
Something that goes well with this is the proverbial "be good to the clerk". In any organization of any reasonable size, there are a group of unappreciated, poorly-paid people that do menial work. But often that work is essential to the operation of the company, and quite often this is because they do something trivial that is also essential to your being able to do your job, or makes your work much easier for you to do.
These are the people that idiots and managers walk on all the time. Of all the people to have permanently pissed at you, these are the worst. I'd rather have the owner not like me than his secretary.
Being on good terms with these people gives you so many benefits that it's ridiculous. They have 50 people that need something. If you are on good terms with them, you can get that something whenever you want, put yourself at the front of their queue. When you get to know them, they may even anticipate your needs and adjust their schedule ever so slightly to help you. Not everyone in this position works that way, but many do, and they are quite happy to put in a little extra effort to those that treat them civially. I'm not saying to take advantage of them, but you can work smoother with anyone you are getting along with, and these are actually very important people to have a good working relationship with. Spending 2 minutes chatting with one of these peopel at lunch could translate into them spending 10 seconds of their afternoon looking through the stack of paper with your name on it to do first, advancing your schedule by maybe an hour. Being good to these people can pay you back in spades.
I have seen this effect work in my favor and to the favor of those that I know on many occaions. Secretaries, receptionists, janitors, maintenance staff... all underappreciated and often grateful to those that show them respect or even basic acknowledgement that they are just not used to getting from anyone.
My canned response in those discussions now is "I will give you at least as much notice when I leave as I expect to get if I am to be laid off or fired." This usually ends the conversaion, as most management is not prepared to shovel on the BS thick enough to counter that point. So far none of them have even asked me to clarify for them how long that period is. I assume they feel that means no notice?
In the I.T. business though, in most cases, management takes the ultra-paranoid approach. They take your card at the door and hand you a box of your belongings and a manilla envelope containing your last paycheck, information on company policy, cobra, and how to file for unemployment. Again I see this as very rude and unfair to the worker, but a wise move for the employer. There's always going to be that 1% that "goes postal" on the databases if you give him notice, and they are just trying to protect themselves from this hazard. If the employee is even a little bit mental and knows he can do 50x the damage to the company in the next 2 minutes than the company could ever recover from him in damages, he just might do it for spite's sake. If he's already in bad financial shape and you're about to take away his income, you'd better hope that either he's stable or you're prepared, because he may not have much to lose.
Employers don't see this behavior as having any negative side-effect to the company. Sure they're shafting someone, but that someone can't do anything to you anymore. It won't affect their productivity since they are no longer working for you. And the remaining employees are mostly taking the attitude that they wouldn't do that to me, or simply believing that they will never be fired or laid off and have to run that risk to begin with. If the company has nothing to lose by doing it, or everything to risk by NOT doing it, it just makes sense. Unfortunate, but it is probably the smartest thing for them to do.
(oh, if you work somewhere with a severence package, count yourself lucky... they don't become common until you get into a fairly high income bracket)
Summarizing that, A. the company expects loyalty from their workers, yet B. the company rarely if ever demonstrates loyalty to the worker. This behavior is not really deceitful or contrary, it's good business sense. Take advantage of everyone you can (including and especially your own employees) as far as you can to maximize proffit. If people are getting too pissed off and turnover is too high, you're probably pulling a little too hard on your staff. If proffits are minimal but your staff don't have a care in the world, you are probably letting them off a bit too easy for your company's good. Every company has their own point of maximum proffit. Telemarketing for example, seems to have a very low point and most employees are treated like last week's newspaper - worth very little, easily replaced with something better, and quickly discarded and forgotten about.
One of my favorite examples is that companies expect a 2 week notice (minimum, they seem to want a 2 year notice?) when you are going to quit. Just TRY and get them to agree to giving YOU a two week notice before they can you. First they laugh at the idea because they just consider it totally absurd. Then they wince and realize you have a valid point, and finally they frown as they realize they have absolutely no moral grounds to ask you to give notice, and there's absolutely nothing they can do to you after you carry through on said plan. I've had that conversation now with two employers, and it's interesting to watch them try to say with a straight face that no, we will not give you notice, but it's YOUR moral obligation to give US notice.
Another good point that has thus far been missed is that sometimes the company can't be loyal to you. I worked a telemarketing firm, and through my skill and tendency to take over projects that were being bungled and fix them, I put myself in a somewhat "irreplaceable" position - one of the employees that is the only one that knows how to properly do several essential things in an organization, which refuses to allow time to train more people on how to do your job. This was good for job security, so I thought, until the location I worked at closed its doors suddenly one Wednesday afternoon. Oops! "Irreplaceable" does not always translate to "job security". Never forget you are a pawn, and in the end will always be treated as such. If not by your manager, then by your NEXT manager, or by HIS manager.
Was the map that was distributed an actual scaled down copy of the actual map this group was publishing, or was it an interpretation of the map? I can see them having a problem with distributing a copy of their map, but if it's merely a new drawing of the same map, then it probably falls into the "public knowledge" domain. You can copywrite a drawing, but you cannot claim copyright over all new drawings of the same item you drew. At least not when it's a publicly accessible thing such as a transit system.
There should also be a cap to legal expense reimbursement. Say you are joe sixpack that sues Totota because your airbag didn't deploy. They send an army of 20 high paid lawyers out to basically smother you. Unless the judge is really on the ball and does an excellent job of protecting your rights, (while remaining impartial) you will lose. Then you get to pay 20 lawyers what, $50,000 each? wheeeee...
Maybe set the limit on reimbursement to be say, double what your legal fees were. Hire a hometown lawyer and spend maybe $3500 on legal fees, then if you lose it still hurts ($7000) but it doesn't chapter 11 you.
The problem with that solution is twofold. Already beaten ad-anusium is the issue of two clients collaborating to cheat, which cannot really be compensated for.
The other issue less addressed is bandwidth. The tracker is the one weak link in BT, and if you recall back a year or so ago there was a problem with the trackers where they would send data on ALL peers, to all peers. (trackers now cap at 50 entries, randomly selected usually) This bug caused swarms that doubled in size to quadruple tracker traffic, because now there's 2x the peers, each requesting 2x the data. (so 2x the peers = 4x the traffic) This brought several large swarms to their knees as the trackers buckled under the weight.
Increasing the traffic between the client and the tracker, especially to this extent, would be devastating to BT. Right now all they report is data up and data down. That's like two numbers. Now imagine you're in a swarm and connected to say... 60 peers. That's 60 ups and 60 downs. Anyone can see that is an insane increase in traffic.
Right now things are set up correctly - the main enforcement on leeching is peer to peer review. You don't send me data? I'm not going to send you very much. This is traffic between peers, not between peers and the tracker, which is the best way to manage any distributed system.
In my case it's on a macintosh (not windows nor linux) so sometimes I have as much problems with drivers as you do on linux. I'm looking for a nice self-contained unit that has just the one port to connect to, for maximum portability. High speed is not as important as data protection or portability. I don't think I am ready to assemble my own NAS box either, so the best bet for me right now looks like one of these mini raid5 boxes. One of the machines I'd like to cable up to is a laptop, so an external sata interface is out. I don't care much for USB even though I know 2.0HS is easily on equal footing with FW400, so I would prefer a firewire solution over USB. (use what you're comfortable with in this case)
Those use quite a few more drives than I require, but worth looking into. Shame they have no prices on their web site, will have to give them a ring on Monday and see what they can do.
In my brief browse I didn't see a big writeup on what those enclosures can do, though I did find several good descriptions of what those 5-bay units I found can do. They seem to do everything we need... firewire 800, no controller card, hot swap, hot rebuild, and though I wouldn't trust it... hot grow. That feature set has been going for $3500-ish a year ago, so it's really come down in price lately, which is why we're in the market.
Unfortunately this is a charitable organization. In other words, money is unfortunately a factor. Looking for the best protection for the buck. Right now a RAID is looking like the best way to go, as there is a bit too much data to cost-effectively back up. The current upgrade is a result of a DOUBLE failure on a mirror, which very nearly tanked 250gb of data. (you don't EVEN want to know what I had to go through to get the drive that still spun to mount back up...)
If we can get the cabinet cheap enough, we will be able to buy a fresh set of 5 drives for it instead of recycling our current drives, and can break the mirrors and use their drives for offiste backup. But that's a big "if" right now.
In a perfect world, money would not be a factor, but it's not, so it is.
I've already got a pair of 8 bay towers, same design as your link but beige instead of black. Been using them as software mirrors, which has worked in the past but is becoming very cumbersome. I just was hit with a DOUBLE drive failure that very nearly cost me 250gb of data, so I am looking for a RAID5 self-contained solution. I could really use the improved efficiency of usable space in raid5 - 80% on a 5 drive system, as opposed to 50% on my mirrors. I also want a box that I stuff drives into, and plug one firewire cable into and it looks like a giant HD, with raid5 protection. This will allow me to move the array to another machine when needed. Can't hook it to my laptop if it requires a controller card!
These buggers are hard to find for anywhere near decent cash. I've found one model that is fairly popular, going by several different names and brands, but nobody seems to have them in stock. They look like a GREAT deal and loaded with most or alll of the best features of raid5. (hot swap, live rebuild, live GROW, etc) Has anyone seen one IN STOCK anywhere?
D =45&Cat=Producti harasyfor5.html9 19&refid=1057r e-mini.html
u cts_id/657
Same exact models:
http://www.raidweb.com/fb605fw.html
http://www.micronet.com/General/prodList.asp?CatI
http://www.firewiremax.com/fire-wire-1394-ilink/m
http://www.pcrush.com/prodspec.asp?ln=1&itemno=77
http://www.cooldrives.com/firewire-raid-5-enclosu
http://www.topmicrousa.com/combo-205.html
same internals, different enclosure:
http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/prod
http://www.cooldrives.com/fii13toatade.html
Everyone I call says they have them in stock. Then I ask them to check and they suddenly change their mind and say no it's not really in stock, (despite what their web page says) and they expect it in the generic "1-2 weeks". (retail-speak for "we don't know when it'll be in, please call back later")
Two of them actually told me they have yet to receive any of these units, so I don't think they've shipped from the manufacturer yet? (vaporware?)
A company I used to work for, a fair size place with 6 offices and about 500 employees, didn't care much for me bringing my laptop into work. About every four months my manager would start grumbling that I really shouldn't do that. By some random chance however, each time things were getting despirate, some special need would come up that necessitated my laptop. (there were no company laptops) My machine also had a good hunk of HD space free, scsi with disk recovery tools, and lots of other handy things. Being a mac, it could also convert obscure file formats we would occasionally receive from a client. And that would reset my harassement level back to normal, and the cycle would start over. This went on for the better part of two years.
Ironically, the company was technologically in the dark ages. My laptop was hands-down the fastest machine in the building, and had more storage space on its built-in drive than any single fileserver we owned. (heh, though my lappy didn't have raid...)
The biggest problem we actually had was the windows users bringing in floppies. No, not the regular employees... the IT staff. We used floppies for data backup of stats files, and on at least three occasions I had to go on a "NYB hunt" and flush NYB off probably 1/3 of our stats floppies. (about 100) I suspect the same person on each event. Fortunately that one had a very obvious side effect that made it easy to spot - a system with NYB resident could not format floppies. (it survives ctrl-alt-delete too, irritating bugger, you must cold boot)
PCs may have a death grip on the business scene, but they could do a world of good toward solving the security issue by using powerbooks for their portables. Almost zero risk of getting a virus into the company from it even with the most reckless behavior, and arguably a better portable in any event. (call me a troll if you simply just hate macs, but you must admit I have a valid point!)
Some of that is justifiable. You don't give a 4 year old a set of sharp scissors to cut his construction paper, you give him a set of those stamped safety scissors. But then YOU aren't going to use those safety scissors are you? Of course not.
Here I sit, drinking a tall glass of milk, setting it down 5" from my laptop. I would never advise an 'average user' to do this, because average users are klutzes and when they dump a can of pepsi into their laptop's keyboard I'll be the one that gets to fix it, so I will say "no food around computers" and proceed to pour another tall glass of milk.
It's not hypocracy, it's "who is responsible enough for the privledge". And with no background history to go on, all users are by default considered klutzes and do not have food or drink anywhere near the computer.
Now if a user sees an IT person drinking a cup of coffee at their console they sometimes will flip out and cry foul, "why can't I do that?" But then again little kids will whine equally when they see their older brother with the "real scissors" and they get handed the chrome safeties. Doesn't mean the little tike should get the sharp ones now does it? It's not being unfair, it's just a matter of risk management.
It's also not a matter of playing favorites. A good friend of mine is a klutz. It's very rare to spend 20 minutes around him and NOT see him drop something. I would not advise him to eat around his computer either.
Anyway, enough about eating around computers, the concept extends to any other risky behavior around computers really, in much the same way.
I thought you could not (successfully) sue for libel or slander if what was said was true? (and isn't there also a window of opportunity for posting opinions, as long as they are plainly stated as opinion and not statement of fact?)
Hard to say for sure. I know I work on all my own hardware and have been working with mos and cmos down to chip assembly for better than what... well, working with electronics in general for over 25 years so before mos/cmos was even around, and never popped a chip, never had a chip fail later either. Ya if you're reckless you'll zap something but it takes a lot less paranoia to protect against most static issues than a lot of people realize.
It's like the people that are afraid to drive their car up a curb. OK maybe there is a remote risk, but good lord man, loosen up a little.