One day Microsoft are going to realize that stupidly plus money is no match for smart. They can't beat Google and they know it, all they can hope for is to slow Google down a little at huge expense to themselves.
Carry on MS - it's fun to watch you burn your shareholders money.
Solid-state storage may be more reliable than floppies, but it's not perfect. I've had a USB flash drive, an SD card, and two SD card readers fail on me. And an SSD still won't prevent file system corruption when you have hardware issues elsewhere.
Of course solid state drives can still break, of course they can't protect you from non-disk errors. They are however better that magnetic storage in every measurable way except price and the price will keep falling now these things are being mass produced.
I have one in my laptop and the speed improvement is amazing. I did have to take out a 160GB magnetic disk to put in a 64GB SSD that cost about 5 times as much.
It would be quite wonderful if someone could figure out a way to make packages installable easily on all linux distros, or at least create a few "compatibility profiles". This whole repository ubuntu-vs-debian-vs-redhat-vs-mandriva-vs-older-versions-of-same is a nightmare for newbie users.
This has existed for a long time. It's called 'linux standard base' or LSB.
Actually I didn't quite understand if the favored linux virtualization code switched from xen to kvm because of Citrix buying xen and messing with the project, or some other reason.
KVM is Linux, XEN isn't Linux. Redhat is a Linux vendor so prefers Linux over things that are not Linux.
It's not a matter of one being better than the other but a matter of picking one that's closer to what you already know.
I have xubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 2 installed on my laptop. Everything works except screen locking on suspend. I was expecting a few problems but got none.
The ubuntu team have done a really great job with 10.04.
Obama and the rest of the Senators/"Representatives" are pretty much bought-off scumbags who don't represent us at all
All politicals are 'bought-off scumbags' who don't represent anything more than their own self interest. Anyone who really cared would be terrified to have so much responsibility.
1s44c, please don't take this as criticism toward you. I'm just taking this as an example.
Most people on IT really have no idea what high-availability is.
All criticism gratefully accepted. I'd tend to agree that many people in IT really don't have much idea what they are doing.
Basicly, you are right. However the costs involved in reimplementing a second email server using all different hardware and all different software are significant. I could do it but it would take at least twice as long, I'd hit twice the bugs, and have twice the security issues to consider. It would be hard to explain why half the mail was processed by one MTA with one virus scanner and the other half was processed by something else.
Even that would just remove one single point of failure. The registrars could still screw up my domain, a large power outage could take everything down, A routing misconfiguration in China could reroute one of my mailers IPs to someone else's mailserver which would reject my mail. The government could require ISPs to intercept my mail with unintended results. Between us we could no doubt come up with a list of a hundred things that could go wrong and still get hit by the one thing we didn't predict the next day.
I had two mail servers, on two Internet connections. If either went down I'd get an alert and could fix it without mail being affected. I didn't expect both to stop processing mail at the same time. It's always the stuff you don't expect to fail that fails.
My mail was queued on DMZ mailers so nothing was lost, but it was delayed. Some of it may have been business critical.
but we just ran a cracker program on the passwd file )on Solaris at the time) and exposed about 50% of the passwords. Then we went to the affected users and said, "This is your password, right?" After the first shock passed we would say, "It's too easy. You need to change it. Next week we'll run the cracker program again." We also sent around a little tutorial on how to create good passwords by using initials of a memorized sentence (as some have suggested here) After about four runs we were down to less than 10%, and we called it good.
The problem with that is you are never meant to know user passwords. There is a strong chance that the same password along with easier to find details would get you into that users personal banking. If their bank account gets robbed guess who's suspect number 1?
I've changed the john source code so it cracks passwords and forgets them instantly. It tells me what accounts are easily crackable but not the passwords themselves. The problem with that is users sometimes don't believe their password was cracked at all.
For you and me it's possible. For the slashdot readership it's possible. For most office staff who give a dam it's possible.
What do you do with the 60 year old who can't find her applications unless they are icons on the desktop and blames everything she does wrong on 'the windows network'?
Can you tell me how to get her to use a good password and not say it aloud every time she types it?
Do you live in the USA? You do realize that all data handling companies are subject to the same US laws, so move your email anywhere you want, the government can still get it at will.
It's easy enough to get a virtual or real server in Europe.
Panasonic make some very nice tough laptops, there are also a few other makers around that claim they make tough laptops.
However my advice is don't bother. The cost of a low end panasonic toughbook is over 6 times the cost of a good spec thinkpad. The toughbook is unlikely to last 6 times longer and even if it does it's going to be obsolete by that time. Unless your life depends on that one laptop working right now just buy good quality ( not acer ) decent spec laptops and replace either the whole laptop or parts as needed.
You need good and tested backups in any case as even the best laptop could get stolen.
Wikipedia math articles tend to be terse and designed for people who need to look something up that they already know something about.
what are the best resources to learn math?
That depends on what you want to learn, and where you want to start, but there are some resources available at Wikibooks. There's a lot missing there, but plenty to learn. If you want complete resources, I would suggest buying a book--for the full learning experience, possibly taking a class at a local community college or university (just one class, mind you). I don't know about other countries, but it is far from unheard-of in the US (which by your singularization of math is probably your nationality if not your location).
Actually I'm in Europe. I used 'math' because Americans don't have a clue when I mean when I say 'maths'.
I'm really not sure about community college's or their equivalent. Classes move along at the speed of the slowest member and seem to be focused on nothing more than memorizing enough to pass an exam. I grew up in Thatcher's Briton where education was a matter of 'sit down, shut up, and don't ask any awkward questions.'
I'd much prefer a good book. Do you have any recommendations that start with an understandable introduction to calculus? I've searched and found everything either far too easy or depending on knowledge I don't have.
What I would like to know is what are the best resources to learn math? I find wikipedia's math pages are written in such a way that they are pretty near impossible to read, they are all technical accuracy and no explanation.
Are there better resources that don't involve taking 3 years off work to go back to university?
Slashdot Mirror
One day Microsoft are going to realize that stupidly plus money is no match for smart. They can't beat Google and they know it, all they can hope for is to slow Google down a little at huge expense to themselves.
Carry on MS - it's fun to watch you burn your shareholders money.
Solid-state storage may be more reliable than floppies, but it's not perfect. I've had a USB flash drive, an SD card, and two SD card readers fail on me. And an SSD still won't prevent file system corruption when you have hardware issues elsewhere.
Of course solid state drives can still break, of course they can't protect you from non-disk errors. They are however better that magnetic storage in every measurable way except price and the price will keep falling now these things are being mass produced.
I have one in my laptop and the speed improvement is amazing. I did have to take out a 160GB magnetic disk to put in a 64GB SSD that cost about 5 times as much.
I have installed XP on numerous SATA-only machines using a WinXP Pro Volume License CD with only SP2 (and later SP3) without any problem.
Strange. I had to install XP SP2 a while ago and was very annoyed that it needed a floppy for sata support.
To anyone who didn't get the message yet, there are three rules you should follow:
1) Never use the same password in more than one place.
2) Store the passwords somewhere safe.
3) Use good quality passwords.
Unix fans can generate good quality passwords with: /dev/random | cut -b9-
od -N4 -tx4
or slightly better ones with:
dd if=/dev/random count=6 bs=1 | uuencode -m - | tail -2 | head -1
Don't tell me you didn't think of the potential of an artificial ash cloud as a weapon
It would not help much unless you already have a volcano you could trigger artificially and you didn't mind grounding all your own aircraft as well.
Unless Iceland becomes the next target of a US invasion it's not really useful to anyone.
Which only covers the filesystem layout and basic services. It says nothing about APIs or versions of libraries.
It specifies versions of libraries. Google it.
It would be quite wonderful if someone could figure out a way to make packages installable easily on all linux distros, or at least create a few "compatibility profiles". This whole repository ubuntu-vs-debian-vs-redhat-vs-mandriva-vs-older-versions-of-same is a nightmare for newbie users.
This has existed for a long time. It's called 'linux standard base' or LSB.
True. But Redhat put a lot of work into Linux, and I'm happy for my company to help fund those coders, so I buy RHEL licences.
I don't but Linux licenses, the company I work for does.
Actually I didn't quite understand if the favored linux virtualization code switched from xen to kvm because of Citrix buying xen and messing with the project, or some other reason.
KVM is Linux, XEN isn't Linux. Redhat is a Linux vendor so prefers Linux over things that are not Linux.
It's not a matter of one being better than the other but a matter of picking one that's closer to what you already know.
I have xubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 2 installed on my laptop. Everything works except screen locking on suspend. I was expecting a few problems but got none.
The ubuntu team have done a really great job with 10.04.
What is the value of a site without visitors?
The site owners banned these people because they don't see any value in a site without revenue.
Obama and the rest of the Senators/"Representatives" are pretty much bought-off scumbags who don't represent us at all
All politicals are 'bought-off scumbags' who don't represent anything more than their own self interest. Anyone who really cared would be terrified to have so much responsibility.
So what's better?
I'd certainly consider spending money for a higher detection rate.
1s44c, please don't take this as criticism toward you. I'm just taking this as an example.
Most people on IT really have no idea what high-availability is.
All criticism gratefully accepted. I'd tend to agree that many people in IT really don't have much idea what they are doing.
Basicly, you are right. However the costs involved in reimplementing a second email server using all different hardware and all different software are significant. I could do it but it would take at least twice as long, I'd hit twice the bugs, and have twice the security issues to consider. It would be hard to explain why half the mail was processed by one MTA with one virus scanner and the other half was processed by something else.
Even that would just remove one single point of failure. The registrars could still screw up my domain, a large power outage could take everything down, A routing misconfiguration in China could reroute one of my mailers IPs to someone else's mailserver which would reject my mail. The government could require ISPs to intercept my mail with unintended results. Between us we could no doubt come up with a list of a hundred things that could go wrong and still get hit by the one thing we didn't predict the next day.
I had two mail servers, on two Internet connections. If either went down I'd get an alert and could fix it without mail being affected. I didn't expect both to stop processing mail at the same time. It's always the stuff you don't expect to fail that fails.
My mail was queued on DMZ mailers so nothing was lost, but it was delayed. Some of it may have been business critical.
It exists for a reason.
I'm going to subscribe to it now. I don't want to go though that again.
But I can't subscribe to the announce list for every free software product I use, I'd do nothing else but read these lists.
but we just ran a cracker program on the passwd file )on Solaris at the time) and exposed about 50% of the passwords. Then we went to the affected users and said, "This is your password, right?" After the first shock passed we would say, "It's too easy. You need to change it. Next week we'll run the cracker program again." We also sent around a little tutorial on how to create good passwords by using initials of a memorized sentence (as some have suggested here) After about four runs we were down to less than 10%, and we called it good.
The problem with that is you are never meant to know user passwords. There is a strong chance that the same password along with easier to find details would get you into that users personal banking. If their bank account gets robbed guess who's suspect number 1?
I've changed the john source code so it cracks passwords and forgets them instantly. It tells me what accounts are easily crackable but not the passwords themselves. The problem with that is users sometimes don't believe their password was cracked at all.
Such a thing IS possible.
For you and me it's possible. For the slashdot readership it's possible. For most office staff who give a dam it's possible.
What do you do with the 60 year old who can't find her applications unless they are icons on the desktop and blames everything she does wrong on 'the windows network'?
Can you tell me how to get her to use a good password and not say it aloud every time she types it?
Doveryai, no proveryai
Trust, but verify. What You mean is put on a show of trust but act with distrust.
You can monitor, audit, and control your children if you like. What you won't get are well balanced and responsible adults.
How about getting a cheap broadband router and letting the kids chose their own computers?
You are not doing your kids any favors by monitoring everything they do, trust them to use the computers responsibly.
Do you live in the USA? You do realize that all data handling companies are subject to the same US laws, so move your email anywhere you want, the government can still get it at will.
It's easy enough to get a virtual or real server in Europe.
Panasonic make some very nice tough laptops, there are also a few other makers around that claim they make tough laptops.
However my advice is don't bother. The cost of a low end panasonic toughbook is over 6 times the cost of a good spec thinkpad. The toughbook is unlikely to last 6 times longer and even if it does it's going to be obsolete by that time. Unless your life depends on that one laptop working right now just buy good quality ( not acer ) decent spec laptops and replace either the whole laptop or parts as needed.
You need good and tested backups in any case as even the best laptop could get stolen.
I hate to sound like a jerk
You were not being a jerk, you were being helpful.
Wikipedia math articles tend to be terse and designed for people who need to look something up that they already know something about.
what are the best resources to learn math?
That depends on what you want to learn, and where you want to start, but there are some resources available at Wikibooks. There's a lot missing there, but plenty to learn. If you want complete resources, I would suggest buying a book--for the full learning experience, possibly taking a class at a local community college or university (just one class, mind you). I don't know about other countries, but it is far from unheard-of in the US (which by your singularization of math is probably your nationality if not your location).
Actually I'm in Europe. I used 'math' because Americans don't have a clue when I mean when I say 'maths'.
I'm really not sure about community college's or their equivalent. Classes move along at the speed of the slowest member and seem to be focused on nothing more than memorizing enough to pass an exam. I grew up in Thatcher's Briton where education was a matter of 'sit down, shut up, and don't ask any awkward questions.'
I'd much prefer a good book. Do you have any recommendations that start with an understandable introduction to calculus? I've searched and found everything either far too easy or depending on knowledge I don't have.
What I would like to know is what are the best resources to learn math? I find wikipedia's math pages are written in such a way that they are pretty near impossible to read, they are all technical accuracy and no explanation.
Are there better resources that don't involve taking 3 years off work to go back to university?