Forced password changes => lots of help desk calls.
What is less obvious is that they don't lead to any significant increase in security. Most people, if forced to change their password every month, will use something easy to remember (and easily guessable), like qwerty1, qwerty2, qwerty3, etc. But they still can't remember which version they are currently on, hence the help desk calls.
If you force users to choose strong passwords but not to keep changing them, you'll get both an increase in security and a decrease in help desk calls.
My first question would be whether you really need to back up all that 220 GB of data?
If that seems heretical, think about it for a moment. Do you have 220 GB of information, or do you just have 220 GB of data? How much of it could be regenerated? mp3s ripped from CD can be re-ripped. Someone mentioned the enormous backup requirements CGI animators run into, but in the worst case, could these rendered files be regenerated in a few days from the original script? You have to weigh the cost of waiting for it to re-render against the cost of backing the whole thing up.
And what about installed software? If you know what is installed, you only have to back up the machine-specific configuration and customisations, because you can re-install the software. It will take longer, yes, but again, you weigh up the pros and cons.
On my home system, I only back up my user data directory,/etc, and a few other miscellaneous bits. That's a tiny fraction of the data stored on the disk, but it is pretty much all of the real information. If I lose my hard disk, I reckon I could get up and running again in a day or so (which for me is fine), and I'd probably find I've cleared out a load of cruft while I'm at it.
No one has said so explicitly so far, but presumably each firewire cable is a simple peer to peer connection. So to connect 3 computers, you need two cables, and at least one computer with 2 or more firewire ports. That central computer would then route IP packets between the two end computers.
If that's correct, then it's really quite immaterial what medium each segment of the network uses. You could replace one of the firewire cables with IR, or ethernet, or 'Wet-piece-of-string'(TM) and nothing would fundamentally change. Each time a packet needed to get to a non-adjacent computer, it would be routed by each intermediate machine. I believe that's how networking was first done before ethernet allowed connecting more than two computers to the same bit of copper.
The good thing is that the actual medium for the signal is abstracted away and applications only need to know about IP packets. So you just need a network stack that can route packets between different network interfaces, which is pretty-much bog standard and the way IP is supposed to work anyway.
Re:You've yet to see station selling suitable fuel
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2
I was referring to the 2000 election and the Florida vote-counting debacle, which is still a bit of a running joke here in the UK. Sorry you didn't get it.
Anyway, thanks for the Electoral College article. A good read.
Re:You've yet to see station selling suitable fuel
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2
As for 'always-on' not being true if the PC is turned off, you have to consider that while the Internet access is free, the cost of keeping the PC powered up doesn't go away. Personally, I think there's a market for low-power small computers for web and e-mail
Excellent point. My current solution is to put my desktop machine into power-saving mode and to spin down the hard disks when I am away from it. I have one of the multimedia keys configured to do this. Coming back from power-saving mode is near-enough instantaneous that effectively it is always on. (It's no good for running a server or using it for voicemail though.)
Forget the pixel-shading. The point of it seems to be the functionality, not the exact appearance. From that perspective, it does look like a nice idea. It would require a lot of reworking of almost all applications though.
Businesses or individuals determined to receive no more unwanted magazines or literature should write a letter to the sender, in a pre-paid envelope if provided, saying that they do not want more copies, quoting the code number on the mailing address label. Note that items marked 'return to sender' are likely to be diverted to landfill by the Post Office (Consignia).
I guess that means that sometimes the Royal Mail will return undelivered junk mail. But for a US perspective, see here and here.
Better still, put the original mailing unopened back in the post, marked 'Return to sender', to get yourself taken off the mailing list.
I do this to all mail sent to me that I can identify as junk without opening it, and as a consequence I don't get more than one or two junk mails a week now, down from two or three a day a few years ago.
any sensible application auto-saves to a different filename so that if you decide to abandon your changes, you can just quit
Others have alluded to this, but the simple answer is for the system to keep track of file versions, and the user then simply chooses a version for a particular purpose.
With the PPC its very very easy not to close applications. What happens? The system slows down to a crawl as it tried to run 5 or 6 different applications.
I think the idea is that once you have closed the document, the application is no-longer there. It relies on applications launching quickly when you open a document of course.
What about if the application is taking over the whole of the desktop?
Does anyone seriously use maximised windows in this day and age? 8-)
Seriously, drag-and-drop beats open/save dialogs hands-down. If you've ever had to load, edit and save a series of documents from one deeply nested location to another deeply nested location using open/save dialogs, you'll know what I mean.
It would be even nicer to live in a country where everyone has a universally accepted form of ID (rather than proof of identity being dependent on whether I can pass a driving test/have my own utility bills/have my own credit card/etc).
Can you really guarantee that no one using these machines will ever want to run a non-standard application?
I know administrators love locked-down machines, but sooner or later (most probably sooner) it will become an unnecessary limitation on some of the users.
I'd second the use of panotools for stitching images together (website currently down). I couldn't immediately get it to work on Linux, but had it running on Windows without problems.
It does all sorts of lens corrections, as well as full translation/rotation and transforms between different projections, so you can get the alignment pretty accurate. It also has an 'almost perfect' sinc function interpolator.
Some languages, in particular Fortran 90/95, are designed to make it easy for the compiler to parallelise the code. The array operations and 'where' constructs are all fully parallelisable without any effort on the part of the programmer.
Of course, Fortan was designed from the ground up to be highly optimisable. But it's not impossible to imagine C libraries being written in the same way. The key is to provide suitably high-level operations, perhaps with call-backs to user functions.
On the other hand, I've heard that Intel's hyperthreading only really works when the two threads are using different parts of the processor's architecture. There would be no real performance gain where similar operations are being done in parallel as in the cases mentioned above.
That's what I do. As soon as the dependency tardist finishes downloading, it opens a new 'read-only' installer. I can get the file name of the tardist, and add this file in the live installer. A bit messy though, don't you think? Or is there an easier way?
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Forced password changes => lots of help desk calls.
What is less obvious is that they don't lead to any significant increase in security. Most people, if forced to change their password every month, will use something easy to remember (and easily guessable), like qwerty1, qwerty2, qwerty3, etc. But they still can't remember which version they are currently on, hence the help desk calls.
If you force users to choose strong passwords but not to keep changing them, you'll get both an increase in security and a decrease in help desk calls.
It's not supposed to be. This is a 'holy war'. 8-)
My first question would be whether you really need to back up all that 220 GB of data?
/etc, and a few other miscellaneous bits. That's a tiny fraction of the data stored on the disk, but it is pretty much all of the real information. If I lose my hard disk, I reckon I could get up and running again in a day or so (which for me is fine), and I'd probably find I've cleared out a load of cruft while I'm at it.
If that seems heretical, think about it for a moment. Do you have 220 GB of information, or do you just have 220 GB of data? How much of it could be regenerated? mp3s ripped from CD can be re-ripped. Someone mentioned the enormous backup requirements CGI animators run into, but in the worst case, could these rendered files be regenerated in a few days from the original script? You have to weigh the cost of waiting for it to re-render against the cost of backing the whole thing up.
And what about installed software? If you know what is installed, you only have to back up the machine-specific configuration and customisations, because you can re-install the software. It will take longer, yes, but again, you weigh up the pros and cons.
On my home system, I only back up my user data directory,
But only one is the Web (as opposed to a web).
See Eric Meyer's CSS Edge site for the original and details of how it is done.
+1 Informative. I thank you 8-)
NO!!
No one has said so explicitly so far, but presumably each firewire cable is a simple peer to peer connection. So to connect 3 computers, you need two cables, and at least one computer with 2 or more firewire ports. That central computer would then route IP packets between the two end computers.
If that's correct, then it's really quite immaterial what medium each segment of the network uses. You could replace one of the firewire cables with IR, or ethernet, or 'Wet-piece-of-string'(TM) and nothing would fundamentally change. Each time a packet needed to get to a non-adjacent computer, it would be routed by each intermediate machine. I believe that's how networking was first done before ethernet allowed connecting more than two computers to the same bit of copper.
The good thing is that the actual medium for the signal is abstracted away and applications only need to know about IP packets. So you just need a network stack that can route packets between different network interfaces, which is pretty-much bog standard and the way IP is supposed to work anyway.
I was referring to the 2000 election and the Florida vote-counting debacle, which is still a bit of a running joke here in the UK. Sorry you didn't get it.
Anyway, thanks for the Electoral College article. A good read.
Are you sure that was more votes?
Sure, that'll work fine, but which is simpler?
But would the copyright of this version expire before you've finished playing it?
I beg to differ.
/etc or some subdirectory, and then tar cvf etc.tar /etc is much easier for most people.
If you scatter your config files far and wide across the filesystem, how to you expect to back them up?
Putting everything to do with configuration in
As for 'always-on' not being true if the PC is turned off, you have to consider that while the Internet access is free, the cost of keeping the PC powered up doesn't go away. Personally, I think there's a market for low-power small computers for web and e-mail
Excellent point. My current solution is to put my desktop machine into power-saving mode and to spin down the hard disks when I am away from it. I have one of the multimedia keys configured to do this. Coming back from power-saving mode is near-enough instantaneous that effectively it is always on. (It's no good for running a server or using it for voicemail though.)
Forget the pixel-shading. The point of it seems to be the functionality, not the exact appearance. From that perspective, it does look like a nice idea. It would require a lot of reworking of almost all applications though.
I didn't expect the FSF inquisition
Looks like we can expect Ogg streaming from the BBC soon
.
Personally, I'm quite happy with RealPlayer. For me at least, it Just Works, so I've seen no reason to try Ogg.
I guess that means that sometimes the Royal Mail will return undelivered junk mail. But for a US perspective, see here and here.
Better still, put the original mailing unopened back in the post, marked 'Return to sender', to get yourself taken off the mailing list.
I do this to all mail sent to me that I can identify as junk without opening it, and as a consequence I don't get more than one or two junk mails a week now, down from two or three a day a few years ago.
any sensible application auto-saves to a different filename so that if you decide to abandon your changes, you can just quit
Others have alluded to this, but the simple answer is for the system to keep track of file versions, and the user then simply chooses a version for a particular purpose.
With the PPC its very very easy not to close applications. What happens? The system slows down to a crawl as it tried to run 5 or 6 different applications.
I think the idea is that once you have closed the document, the application is no-longer there. It relies on applications launching quickly when you open a document of course.
What about if the application is taking over the whole of the desktop?
Does anyone seriously use maximised windows in this day and age? 8-)
Seriously, drag-and-drop beats open/save dialogs hands-down. If you've ever had to load, edit and save a series of documents from one deeply nested location to another deeply nested location using open/save dialogs, you'll know what I mean.
It would be even nicer to live in a country where everyone has a universally accepted form of ID (rather than proof of identity being dependent on whether I can pass a driving test/have my own utility bills/have my own credit card/etc).
Can you really guarantee that no one using these machines will ever want to run a non-standard application?
I know administrators love locked-down machines, but sooner or later (most probably sooner) it will become an unnecessary limitation on some of the users.
I'd second the use of panotools for stitching images together (website currently down). I couldn't immediately get it to work on Linux, but had it running on Windows without problems.
It does all sorts of lens corrections, as well as full translation/rotation and transforms between different projections, so you can get the alignment pretty accurate. It also has an 'almost perfect' sinc function interpolator.
Some languages, in particular Fortran 90/95, are designed to make it easy for the compiler to parallelise the code. The array operations and 'where' constructs are all fully parallelisable without any effort on the part of the programmer.
Of course, Fortan was designed from the ground up to be highly optimisable. But it's not impossible to imagine C libraries being written in the same way. The key is to provide suitably high-level operations, perhaps with call-backs to user functions.
On the other hand, I've heard that Intel's hyperthreading only really works when the two threads are using different parts of the processor's architecture. There would be no real performance gain where similar operations are being done in parallel as in the cases mentioned above.
That's what I do. As soon as the dependency tardist finishes downloading, it opens a new 'read-only' installer. I can get the file name of the tardist, and add this file in the live installer. A bit messy though, don't you think? Or is there an easier way?
The most significant thing about this article is that it could have been written 4 years ago.