Yes, because $350-$400 for a copy of Windows Server 2003 web edition is SO expensive for a company that makes expensive robots. Not. If you want to have a presence on the web for your company don't do it by using a workstation as your information disemination device.
A legal/contractual agreement which is established by a click through agreement is unlikely to be enforcable, and even if it were, HOW are they going to enforce it? Are they going to sue you for linking to them? If the sued party got an even semi-competent judge and council it wouldn't be much of an issue, if you put a site on the public internet, and don't take proper technical measures to insure that people don't take actions you don't want them to then your site is pretty much fair game. It's extremely easy to insure that people don't go to a part of your site that you don't want them to, porn operators have been doing it for the better part of a decade now, so scrap the stupid unenforcable EULA crap and have your web monkies earn their salaries!
Yes, there are recievers that use the L2 signal to measure ionospheric interference. They do not decode the P (military) code, but they don't need to, they can gain almost all of the positional accuracy gains of the military units just by measuring the shift in the L2 band carrier signal. Sure you can't use it at Mach 2, but aquisition times for modern dual frequency recievers is acceptable for just about any civilian application.
Not at all, in fact there are ALREADY commercially available systems that use the timing differences between the commercial and military signals to better model ionospheric interference. Combine WAAS with such a system and you can get sub one foot accuracy in a decent amount of time (minutes). If you need higher precision you can give it more time, or use a system that uses both US and Russian systems, once the European system comes online I expect surveyor grade systems to implement a tri system setup that would allow VERY precise telemetry in a fairly quick amount of time.
Holly crap thats a good idea! I'm planning a trip from northest Ohio to Yellowstone late this summer and such a feature would absolutly rock. Even with AAA Triptiks (tm) it can still be a bit of a pain to plan such trips, a Google Maps feature that could plan the whole thing including bathroom stops and food stops would be VERY cool.
Well, that explains it then, a coworker had just finished staging a new Exchange server replacement for a client, and had it doing burnin, well the motherboard died and so he called HP last Tuesday. The server had a 4 hour support contract, but being in the afternoon with noone wanting to stay after hours to meet the tech we said wed morning would be fine. Coworker gets into the office wed afternoon after being out at client sites and inquires as to the status of the server, we tell him no part arrived and no tech call. He called HP and they assured him that a tech would be out the next day, well he was out at a client all day thursday and so when he returns to the office friday morning there is a tech there, but no part! Not only had the tech not come out on thursday as promised but when he got there there was nothing for him to do. So he calls up to complain and they tell him that the needed part is back ordered two weeks! It's a server motherboard for a server with a 4 hour SLA and they have a 2 week backorder on a critical part?!?! So he demands to talk to a supervisor to get a complete replacement system shipped out, and she tells him that the part is in fact in stock and that she assures him it will be there no later than 5pm friday, well he waits till 6pm and no part, so he calls and they assure him that the part is in fact in transit, he doesn't want to wait any longer so he heads home and makes sure the case has his cell and pager numbers listed. Well, Monday morning he gets into the office, and still no mobo, he calls to again complain and he is told that it was sent Fedex next day air (not courier which is what was promised) and that it should arrive some time that morning, so finally around 10am Monday the part arrives without a tech. So a part which by contract should have been there by end of business Tuesday afternoon instead arrived 6 days later! This is the single worst experience any of my colleagues has ever had with one of the big 4 server makers (HP, IBM, Dell, Sun) and my coworker was very adamant at pointing this out to the VP of whatever he eventually got up to. With the "upgrade" to the new SAP system as reference this now makes SO much sense. A bad ERP system implementation can literally kill a company, and one as weakened as the post Carly HP just might be a likely victim. I hope for the sake of all of the great people who work at HP that something turns the company around and that the aparant travesty that is their SAP install doesn't end up being the final nail in their coffin.
Remember that the 4500 Color series printers are not single pass, so you have to multiply the page count by 4 to get an accurate duty rating vs a typical black and white engine. So your 4500 has the equivilant of 800K pages, which while not unheard of (LJ4's went over 1 million pages routinely), is still rather high. Add to that the fact that they are WAY more mechanically complex with about 10x the moving parts and you can understand why they seem a lot more worn out at an "early" stage. Personally I think if anything major breaks on a 4500 is better to just get a new printer because it would take hours and hours to do any major work like replacing the carousel drive gear.
No, what he is saying is that "business optimized" PC's from Dell are ones where you can order a PC with the same configuration 6 months later and it will have the same graphics card, network card, etc. This is NOT true of the Dimension line, they use whatever part meets the generic spec list and is the cheapest this week. If you want to roll out from a Ghost image or a standardized installer over hundreds or thousands of desktops then it can be worth the extra cost for the standardized systems to minimize bugs and gotchas. Of course if you are getting raped for more than say 25% price premium it's probably smarter to just buy a bunch of extra machines for newhires and change/adds/upgrades and buy a bulk order of the cheaper systems.
No, then are you willing to work at the same rate as your Indian competition?
No, then if you wish to have a job you shouldn't be suprised at all that your employer would try to charge more for your services then those of someone with inferior communications skills (most Indians speak English, either as a primary or at worst secondary but daily language). Whenever I spec a server for a client from Dell it ALWAYS gets Gold support unless we are going bargain basement and getting hardware only support, bronze and silver aren't worth a damn.
Doing things like transcoding/encoding of multimedia content is one of those "niche" areas where assembly is still needed. If it takes 1.5hours or 3 hours to transcode a movie is a BIG deal, especially if you have to do it many times to archive a library of old content. Sure most programmers won't need it, ever, but that's been pretty much true since we got high level languages and computers got more than a couple hundred K of RAM.
I'm running Firefox 1.0 and setting the pref to false, it did nothing to prevent the spoof. Even after closing all browser windows and restarting Firefox it still works. The certificate and the source on the origional page show the real site, but that's a very high hurdle to jump, even for most technical users.
Stupid freaking troll, digitally imported was one of the first, and one of the finest streaming content providers. Many people I know tune into DI daily, and none of them had to be advertised to, they just heard what I was listening to and asked what it was. My only gripe is that you have to pay too much for decent quality streams.
That's funny, I was on the Internet back when it was mostly the NSFnet backbone, through a free dialup connection to the local library which peered through the Cleveland Freenet which provided FREE Internet access. So yes, I was around before commercial intersts overtook the Internet. It was the progress of technology, not just commercial interests which sped up Interent access. Wireless networking in this case was refering to fourth generation cellular and ultrawideband mobile wireless as will be available in a successor to 802.11, NONE of that technology requires me to consume ads! Advertising is an inefficient and to me personally offensive way of financing content, which is why I do my damndest to buy generic when it's available and of equivilant quality to the name brand alternative. I pay for my Internet access AND content thank you very much.
That's funny, I listen to Soma FM all the time, never heard a commercial. I HAVE sent them a check a couple times to help out. I didn't have to but I recieve so much pleasure from it I felt it would be rude not to help them out. As the cost of bandwidth continues to drop the cost of doing non-traditional radio over the internet will as well. Not only that but wireless internet access will mean that we can get new content almost anywhere at any time. I hope the old media cartels fall hard, but somehow I think inertia and capital will help them out.
As someone who does a LOT of PC support in addition to my main role as a sysadmin and network designer let me tell you that Clippy (and his often more annoying brothers and sisters) are still alive and well even in Office 2003. YOU may not see them because you or your sysadmin uninstalled him or deactivated him but I can assure you that he's still out there and kicking. Oh yeah and in case you haven't noticed MS SQL Server has a bigger piece of the paid database market then ever. SQL Server 2000 is actually pretty good and from what I've seen of the Beta SQL2005 is going to be even better. It might not be Oracle or DB2 but it's pretty darn good, and it's even affordable =)
Why do you ignore compressed figures? My real world experience tells me that compression averages 1.5-2x, this is across dozens of clients in different industries. Tape does the compression in hardware so it increases throughput whereas host based compression to HDD almost always decreases throughput. If you aren't using compression with tape then you aren't getting one of its biggest benifits. Tape prices essentially never go up, and they often (not always) go down over the usefull life of the drive. You might have had a bad experience with a single tape drive, I've had good experience with literally hundreds of drives. To give you a good example from a couple years ago, I worked at a client that had a clustered Netapp F880 system, 6TB raw storage between two systems, and another couple TB between a couple dozen servers. How do you back that up with disk when HDD's are 160GB max? With tape you use a three drive autoloader with a hundred tapes and change the tapes out once a month (not counting removing offsite sets). For a single server it may be practical and feasable to use removable disks for backup, but as anyone who's ever worked in a real datacenter can tell you it's just won't work for backing up large amounts of data.
WTF? Why wasn't a data recovery firm like Drivesavers contacted? Unless data was actually corrupted disk failure should NOT have caused much if any data to be lost. Physical failure of the drive mechanism (by FAR the most common failure mode for a HDD) or failure of controller electronics is something that data recovery firms have a very high percentage chance of recovering. RAID partitioning makes little difference as they are skilled in recoving from these types of issues and know how the data will be laid out. Sure it will cost you 10's of thousands for that volume of data and that complexity of recovery, but I'm willing to bet that ONE test run probably costs in the same ballpark as the recovery would have.
CD-RW uses a phase change crystaline latice to store data, not a volatile organic dye. This means that the chemical breakdown seen in CD-R's is not going to be present in a CD-RW. For this reason I think that CD-RW is a vastly superior archival solution, of course it doesn't work in areas where WORM is mandated (such as securities firms) but for something like home backups it should seriously be considered. Unfortunatly even with the recent flurry of attention to CD-R archival quality (or lack thereof) I still haven't seen even a pseudo-scientific study done on CD-RW disks. Early on there was some flutter about CD-RW having a shorter archival life then CD-R, but back then CD-R manufacturers were claiming 100+ year lifespans, which we know simply isn't true.
Of the Maxtor lines with a statistically significant number of entries in the storage review reliability database the only one with an above average number of failures is the DiamondMax Plus 9, which I unfortunatly recently had to "upgrade" to as it was the only high capacity drive I had available (bought it on sale a year ago for $80 for a 160GB version, now I know why it was so cheap). With this in mind I back up all the data I care about to a couple of older DiamondMax D740X drives which have a significantly better than average track record. IBM/Hitachi and Western Digital seem to be much more hit or miss, and Seagate is by FAR the champion of reliability, guess I will probably put up the extra couple bucks for the Seagate drive next time, and also explains why almost all server drives I've seen in the last couple years were Seagate.
I personally believe tapes and tape drives are a big con-job nowadays.
They may not be great for home backups (they never really were) but tape is definitly NOT a con-job. LTO-3 is 800GB per ~$150 tape, disk can't touch that, and they backup at up to 160MB/s, again a single drive can't touch that. The only reasonable solutions to backing up LOTS of data are tape or farms and farms of drives which are offsite with a VERY high speed network connection and which are write protected while not being backed up to. The latter can be done but it generally makes tape look cheap. Again for home use there probably isn't a lot of use for tape (I backup my machine by HDD as well), but for my clients I can't imagine using anything other than tape as an offsite/archival solution.
What you meant to say is that if you care about your data you will keep it on hard disks with an additional removable media solution kept at a different site and not immediatly vulnerable to any data errors that effect the main data site.
Slashdot Mirror
My bad, with the site slashdoted I assumed it was some company doing things on the cheap, didn't notice the .edu in the URL. Mea culpa.
Yes, because $350-$400 for a copy of Windows Server 2003 web edition is SO expensive for a company that makes expensive robots. Not. If you want to have a presence on the web for your company don't do it by using a workstation as your information disemination device.
A legal/contractual agreement which is established by a click through agreement is unlikely to be enforcable, and even if it were, HOW are they going to enforce it? Are they going to sue you for linking to them? If the sued party got an even semi-competent judge and council it wouldn't be much of an issue, if you put a site on the public internet, and don't take proper technical measures to insure that people don't take actions you don't want them to then your site is pretty much fair game. It's extremely easy to insure that people don't go to a part of your site that you don't want them to, porn operators have been doing it for the better part of a decade now, so scrap the stupid unenforcable EULA crap and have your web monkies earn their salaries!
Half hour after it hit the front page, and it looks nothing like a slashdotting, perhaps geeks are a little better in love than we let on =)
Yes, there are recievers that use the L2 signal to measure ionospheric interference. They do not decode the P (military) code, but they don't need to, they can gain almost all of the positional accuracy gains of the military units just by measuring the shift in the L2 band carrier signal. Sure you can't use it at Mach 2, but aquisition times for modern dual frequency recievers is acceptable for just about any civilian application.
Not at all, in fact there are ALREADY commercially available systems that use the timing differences between the commercial and military signals to better model ionospheric interference. Combine WAAS with such a system and you can get sub one foot accuracy in a decent amount of time (minutes). If you need higher precision you can give it more time, or use a system that uses both US and Russian systems, once the European system comes online I expect surveyor grade systems to implement a tri system setup that would allow VERY precise telemetry in a fairly quick amount of time.
Holly crap thats a good idea! I'm planning a trip from northest Ohio to Yellowstone late this summer and such a feature would absolutly rock. Even with AAA Triptiks (tm) it can still be a bit of a pain to plan such trips, a Google Maps feature that could plan the whole thing including bathroom stops and food stops would be VERY cool.
Well, that explains it then, a coworker had just finished staging a new Exchange server replacement for a client, and had it doing burnin, well the motherboard died and so he called HP last Tuesday. The server had a 4 hour support contract, but being in the afternoon with noone wanting to stay after hours to meet the tech we said wed morning would be fine. Coworker gets into the office wed afternoon after being out at client sites and inquires as to the status of the server, we tell him no part arrived and no tech call. He called HP and they assured him that a tech would be out the next day, well he was out at a client all day thursday and so when he returns to the office friday morning there is a tech there, but no part! Not only had the tech not come out on thursday as promised but when he got there there was nothing for him to do. So he calls up to complain and they tell him that the needed part is back ordered two weeks! It's a server motherboard for a server with a 4 hour SLA and they have a 2 week backorder on a critical part?!?! So he demands to talk to a supervisor to get a complete replacement system shipped out, and she tells him that the part is in fact in stock and that she assures him it will be there no later than 5pm friday, well he waits till 6pm and no part, so he calls and they assure him that the part is in fact in transit, he doesn't want to wait any longer so he heads home and makes sure the case has his cell and pager numbers listed. Well, Monday morning he gets into the office, and still no mobo, he calls to again complain and he is told that it was sent Fedex next day air (not courier which is what was promised) and that it should arrive some time that morning, so finally around 10am Monday the part arrives without a tech. So a part which by contract should have been there by end of business Tuesday afternoon instead arrived 6 days later! This is the single worst experience any of my colleagues has ever had with one of the big 4 server makers (HP, IBM, Dell, Sun) and my coworker was very adamant at pointing this out to the VP of whatever he eventually got up to. With the "upgrade" to the new SAP system as reference this now makes SO much sense. A bad ERP system implementation can literally kill a company, and one as weakened as the post Carly HP just might be a likely victim. I hope for the sake of all of the great people who work at HP that something turns the company around and that the aparant travesty that is their SAP install doesn't end up being the final nail in their coffin.
Remember that the 4500 Color series printers are not single pass, so you have to multiply the page count by 4 to get an accurate duty rating vs a typical black and white engine. So your 4500 has the equivilant of 800K pages, which while not unheard of (LJ4's went over 1 million pages routinely), is still rather high. Add to that the fact that they are WAY more mechanically complex with about 10x the moving parts and you can understand why they seem a lot more worn out at an "early" stage. Personally I think if anything major breaks on a 4500 is better to just get a new printer because it would take hours and hours to do any major work like replacing the carousel drive gear.
No, what he is saying is that "business optimized" PC's from Dell are ones where you can order a PC with the same configuration 6 months later and it will have the same graphics card, network card, etc. This is NOT true of the Dimension line, they use whatever part meets the generic spec list and is the cheapest this week. If you want to roll out from a Ghost image or a standardized installer over hundreds or thousands of desktops then it can be worth the extra cost for the standardized systems to minimize bugs and gotchas. Of course if you are getting raped for more than say 25% price premium it's probably smarter to just buy a bunch of extra machines for newhires and change/adds/upgrades and buy a bulk order of the cheaper systems.
in India?
No, then are you willing to work at the same rate as your Indian competition?
No, then if you wish to have a job you shouldn't be suprised at all that your employer would try to charge more for your services then those of someone with inferior communications skills (most Indians speak English, either as a primary or at worst secondary but daily language). Whenever I spec a server for a client from Dell it ALWAYS gets Gold support unless we are going bargain basement and getting hardware only support, bronze and silver aren't worth a damn.
Doing things like transcoding/encoding of multimedia content is one of those "niche" areas where assembly is still needed. If it takes 1.5hours or 3 hours to transcode a movie is a BIG deal, especially if you have to do it many times to archive a library of old content. Sure most programmers won't need it, ever, but that's been pretty much true since we got high level languages and computers got more than a couple hundred K of RAM.
I'm running Firefox 1.0 and setting the pref to false, it did nothing to prevent the spoof. Even after closing all browser windows and restarting Firefox it still works. The certificate and the source on the origional page show the real site, but that's a very high hurdle to jump, even for most technical users.
Stupid freaking troll, digitally imported was one of the first, and one of the finest streaming content providers. Many people I know tune into DI daily, and none of them had to be advertised to, they just heard what I was listening to and asked what it was. My only gripe is that you have to pay too much for decent quality streams.
That's funny, I was on the Internet back when it was mostly the NSFnet backbone, through a free dialup connection to the local library which peered through the Cleveland Freenet which provided FREE Internet access. So yes, I was around before commercial intersts overtook the Internet. It was the progress of technology, not just commercial interests which sped up Interent access. Wireless networking in this case was refering to fourth generation cellular and ultrawideband mobile wireless as will be available in a successor to 802.11, NONE of that technology requires me to consume ads! Advertising is an inefficient and to me personally offensive way of financing content, which is why I do my damndest to buy generic when it's available and of equivilant quality to the name brand alternative. I pay for my Internet access AND content thank you very much.
That's funny, I listen to Soma FM all the time, never heard a commercial. I HAVE sent them a check a couple times to help out. I didn't have to but I recieve so much pleasure from it I felt it would be rude not to help them out. As the cost of bandwidth continues to drop the cost of doing non-traditional radio over the internet will as well. Not only that but wireless internet access will mean that we can get new content almost anywhere at any time. I hope the old media cartels fall hard, but somehow I think inertia and capital will help them out.
As someone who does a LOT of PC support in addition to my main role as a sysadmin and network designer let me tell you that Clippy (and his often more annoying brothers and sisters) are still alive and well even in Office 2003. YOU may not see them because you or your sysadmin uninstalled him or deactivated him but I can assure you that he's still out there and kicking. Oh yeah and in case you haven't noticed MS SQL Server has a bigger piece of the paid database market then ever. SQL Server 2000 is actually pretty good and from what I've seen of the Beta SQL2005 is going to be even better. It might not be Oracle or DB2 but it's pretty darn good, and it's even affordable =)
Why do you ignore compressed figures? My real world experience tells me that compression averages 1.5-2x, this is across dozens of clients in different industries. Tape does the compression in hardware so it increases throughput whereas host based compression to HDD almost always decreases throughput. If you aren't using compression with tape then you aren't getting one of its biggest benifits. Tape prices essentially never go up, and they often (not always) go down over the usefull life of the drive. You might have had a bad experience with a single tape drive, I've had good experience with literally hundreds of drives. To give you a good example from a couple years ago, I worked at a client that had a clustered Netapp F880 system, 6TB raw storage between two systems, and another couple TB between a couple dozen servers. How do you back that up with disk when HDD's are 160GB max? With tape you use a three drive autoloader with a hundred tapes and change the tapes out once a month (not counting removing offsite sets). For a single server it may be practical and feasable to use removable disks for backup, but as anyone who's ever worked in a real datacenter can tell you it's just won't work for backing up large amounts of data.
Drive Savers would probably give you a 48 hour turnaround if you were willing to pay, their longest (cheapest) turn around is 5 days plus shipping.
WTF? Why wasn't a data recovery firm like Drivesavers contacted? Unless data was actually corrupted disk failure should NOT have caused much if any data to be lost. Physical failure of the drive mechanism (by FAR the most common failure mode for a HDD) or failure of controller electronics is something that data recovery firms have a very high percentage chance of recovering. RAID partitioning makes little difference as they are skilled in recoving from these types of issues and know how the data will be laid out. Sure it will cost you 10's of thousands for that volume of data and that complexity of recovery, but I'm willing to bet that ONE test run probably costs in the same ballpark as the recovery would have.
Don't lump RW in with CDR!
CD-RW uses a phase change crystaline latice to store data, not a volatile organic dye. This means that the chemical breakdown seen in CD-R's is not going to be present in a CD-RW. For this reason I think that CD-RW is a vastly superior archival solution, of course it doesn't work in areas where WORM is mandated (such as securities firms) but for something like home backups it should seriously be considered. Unfortunatly even with the recent flurry of attention to CD-R archival quality (or lack thereof) I still haven't seen even a pseudo-scientific study done on CD-RW disks. Early on there was some flutter about CD-RW having a shorter archival life then CD-R, but back then CD-R manufacturers were claiming 100+ year lifespans, which we know simply isn't true.
Of the Maxtor lines with a statistically significant number of entries in the storage review reliability database the only one with an above average number of failures is the DiamondMax Plus 9, which I unfortunatly recently had to "upgrade" to as it was the only high capacity drive I had available (bought it on sale a year ago for $80 for a 160GB version, now I know why it was so cheap). With this in mind I back up all the data I care about to a couple of older DiamondMax D740X drives which have a significantly better than average track record. IBM/Hitachi and Western Digital seem to be much more hit or miss, and Seagate is by FAR the champion of reliability, guess I will probably put up the extra couple bucks for the Seagate drive next time, and also explains why almost all server drives I've seen in the last couple years were Seagate.
I personally believe tapes and tape drives are a big con-job nowadays.
They may not be great for home backups (they never really were) but tape is definitly NOT a con-job. LTO-3 is 800GB per ~$150 tape, disk can't touch that, and they backup at up to 160MB/s, again a single drive can't touch that. The only reasonable solutions to backing up LOTS of data are tape or farms and farms of drives which are offsite with a VERY high speed network connection and which are write protected while not being backed up to. The latter can be done but it generally makes tape look cheap. Again for home use there probably isn't a lot of use for tape (I backup my machine by HDD as well), but for my clients I can't imagine using anything other than tape as an offsite/archival solution.
What you meant to say is that if you care about your data you will keep it on hard disks with an additional removable media solution kept at a different site and not immediatly vulnerable to any data errors that effect the main data site.
You should be able to find plenty of starting points here.