Disk will always be. Since disk is your slowest spot you will always be disk I/O bound. So in effect there's no real reason to worry about network throughput from the NIC. NICs are efficient enough these days to just about never get bogged down. What you would want to look at for the network side would be your physical topology -- make sure you have a nice switch with nice backplane throughput.
About disks:
Your average fibre channel drive will top out at 300 IO/s because few people sell drives that can write any faster to the spindle (cost prohibitive for several reasons). Cache helps this out greatly. SATA is slightly slower at between 240-270 IO/s depending on manufacturer and type.
Your throughput will depend totally upon what type of IO is hitting your NAS and how you have it all configured (RAID type, cache size, etc). If you have a lot of random IO, your total throughput will be low once you've saturated your cache. Reads will always be worse than writes even though prefetching helps.
If you're working with multi-gigabyte datasets, you'll want to increase the number of spindles (ie number of disks) to as high as you can go within your budget and make sure you have gobs of cache. If you decide to RAID it, which type you use will depend on how much integrity you need (we use a lot of RAID 10 with lots of spindles for many of our databases). That will speed you up significantly more than worrying about the NICs throughput. don't worry about that until you start topping a significant portion of your bandwidth -- for example, say 60MB/sec sustained over the wire.
This doesn't get fun until you start having to architect petabytes worth of disk.;)
Tier-1/2 transit providers have been depeering and blackholing each other since the the Internet's infancy. Sometimes over as little as a squabble between the two companys' engineers. Usually it gets resolved quickly ($$$). Sometimes it doesn't. Seems like a stupid thing to do IMO since it is doing nothing but hurting their customers.
[SprintCust] Hey, we can't get to (insert CompanyB web application -- important to SprintCust's business) [SprintCust] *calls up CompanyB* Hey, is your application down? We're trying to do our business with you but we can't and we're losing a lot of money [SprintCust]... [SprintCust]...it's because of WHAT? [SprintCust] FUCK SPRINT
Then multiply that by a number whose product will cause the irritation of some upper managers and this will finally end -- they'll at least route traffic to them if they don't re-peer. (in theory -- i never said Sprint was a rational company)
Anybody have any ideas on why Sprint might pull a stunt like this as a means to GAIN FCC approval?
They're probably not. Sprint's wireless division isn't run by the same people as their transit network. It's most likely a case of left hand not knowing what the right is doing. If Cogent and Sprint are in litigation and Sprint decides to depeer or blackhole Cogent on their network because of that, it's most likely a decision made by upper management on the data transit infrastructure side and has nothing whatsoever to do with wireless.
I can bet you that the engineers assigned to do the work of depeering/blackholing probably think it's an utterly moronic thing to do... which is why they're not in management.
You'd probably want to check the SLA first. Most have provisions that don't apply to this, at least contractually. As an end-customer you'd be buying access to their public network -- if they choose to depeer or black hole another network, they're usually within the right to do that since THEY own the network you're connecting to. Bad business sense yeah, but otherwise it's probably not breaking any contractual agreement with a customer.
My company does transaction processing (think prepaid and reloadable debit cards, gift cards, etc) and as such our business is heavily IT-related.
I think we have something along the lines of 600 staff -- of those about 100-150 of those are IT-related. This isn't including project managers or anyone else who interface with IT who don't do IT-related work on a regular basis. 1:5.5-6 ratio.
I think it breaks down to something like this (my numbers are probably way off, I haven't seen an org chart in forever):
IT Operations (non-management) Server Infrastructure: 7 Network Infrastructure: 5 Application Support (all tiers, from internal apps to customer-facing apps): ~20 DBAs: 3 Data analyst types (information systems): 10 Global Architecture (the omniscient overlords who guide IT ops): 4 Helpdesk: 4 NOC: 10-12
Overall IT Software Development (coders/QA/etc): ~40ish
Management: ~12
I'm on the operations side so the count on the software side is all guessing. The rest of the employee makeup includes folks such as accounting, finance, sales, marketing, call centers, PMs, etc. Essentially the business breaks down into either folks who get the money to our doorstep, folks who make sure the money keeps flowing, and folks who make the systems that make the money flow.
The numbers can be misleading though... not only because such a ratio isn't the best quantifier -- for my company's business, a ratio of IT staff to others doesn't really tell you much other than that our business is heavily technology-oriented. For example, we have a high number of application support analysts compared to the rest of IT ops but the ratio of support analysts to business customers is something along the lines of 1:1-2000 depending on certain factors. The network group fields requests from both external business customers and internal staff so our support ratio is something like 1:75 (much lower than app support thanks to how different external customers interface with us). The sysadmins manage a ~650 system (physical/virtual/zoned) environment at the tune of about 1:90 overall... but that's not necessarily true since that group includes a couple of folks who work primarily on *NIX and another guy whose sole reason for living is to manage about 250TB of SAN storage. The DBAs... well I'm not even going to go there.
I think, in managerspeak, the phrase is, "the number you get depends on the metric you're trying to track." For my company, its size, and its structure, the ratio is pretty reasonable. We probably have far too many developers but most of that's somewhat due to the amount of concurrent projects rolling at any given moment along with the utterly insane complexity of some of the code they're writing and maintaining. As far as other industries... hard to tell. Depends on the technology needs of the company and/or the amount it is technology-driven.
They've been around about 11 years and have been rather superb for us. We switched to them from using Verisign because it seemed like paying almost a grand a year for a 128/256 validated cert was absolutely ridiculous. Entrust has just as much browser and application (e.g. JBoss) exposure as Verisign and their certs are only $159-199/yr (depending on how many certs you purchase). EV certs are considerably cheaper as well.
Granted it takes them a few business days for the first cert you order, subsequent orders seem to have a turnaround time of 24 hrs.
They work for us, they're relatively cheap, and they don't require chained certificates like some of the cheaper CAs that have popped up over the past few years. As always, do your research and compare the CAs once you've whittled down the short list.:)
Heh. One of the few front-page stories i've seen go over 1000 comments.
Time to contribute to wasting space in the sql server, I guess!
space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster.
I didn't mean blocking out as in "denying them the right to act upon something" such as consuming alcohol, having sexual intercourse, or stealing, etc. I meant denying them knowledge of it and what it does. I really think that having your parents speak to you about things is a lot better than learning it from the street.
I guess a good example of what i'm trying to say is this: I think a child with a parent who explained to them what sex is, the consequences, the potential health problems it can cause, and ways to prevent pregnancy and STDs would probably be better off than a child with parents who do nothing but preach abstinence and "sex is bad, mmkay?". We all have our opinions and mine is probably as biased as the next, but almost everyone I know that have parents who tried to inform and explain things to them at the appropriate times have turned out far better off than the ones who got to learn it from the world because their parents refused to acknowledge informing them about it. There are always the exceptions of course.
You know, whether or not this code was left in accidentally, left as a quick 'n' easy upgrade path for rollouts in other areas, or whatnot, there's one thing I can't help to think about one thing:
I bet that one (or more) of the designers just wanted to give the DVD CCA some actual multi-billion-dollar-revenue ass to try to kick so they'll think twice about screwing with the little guy.
Sure, the DeCSS thing may have been more of a big deal in a sense; but if they took the time to trace the link you put on your page that you got from your friend's brother's cousin's sister's friend's boyfriend and then pay a lawyer $450/hour to cite it on a legal document, then they're probably gonna gripe about this until someone decides they're tired of monopolistic punks and they go on a mass killing spree.
In real life, people are trying to legislate, sue or pay others to raise their children. Every plastic bag imprinted with "This is Not a Toy" is testament, as is every lawsuit suing heavy metal bands for responsibility for teen suicides.
And how many kids have you raised, buddy? Everybody's an expert until they actually try it.
Well, well, well. I have to say that in my few fleeting moments i've had in this mortal coil myself, I think I know what raising a kid must be like. I've done hundreds of babysitting jobs, many being overnight excursions while parents went too far away to get back before morning and whatnot. I've had to babysit children as young as 6 months; as old as 12 years. No doubt it is a hard thing to do to keep up with them (especially when you've got 4-6 on your hands at one time), but I seriously think that the angle of attack on the statement above is rather askew. For it is not the children's fault most of the time for many things. You must remember, their minds are still developing. This means that they must rely on someone else who is older to help them along. You have to teach them or else they can twist and contort things into weird perceptions. (Of course I'm speaking of smaller children here.)
People definately are attempting to legislate, sue, and pay others to raise their children and it sickens me. Plastic bags and other things that state "this is not a toy" is just a small example of it. "Well let's see, if it's not a toy, why don't I just give it to my son here to play with! While i'm at it, let me go buy him a bow and some arrows too!" Then they go and sue the companies because they were stupid enough to do such a thing and it all becomes a blame game. It's stupid. It's all damned common sense. If parents can't do their job teaching their kids common sense, right from wrong, red from purple, left from right, why do you expect the government to do it? If you're going to leave your child with the responsibility of surfing the internet without either supervising them yourself or teaching them about certain things they might find (depending upon age group), then it's the fault of the parent.
"Well do you think I can keep up with my child 24/7?" If you chose to have the child, you damn well should have thought about that, shouldn't you? Didn't plan on having him/her, it just popped up? Then making as much time as possible with your child should be first priority. Attention and teaching is everything to them. The way you bring them up in their early years of life has a lot to do with how they are in their pre-teens, teens, and beyond.
If you didn't catch the drift of all that for one reason or another (probably due to my irregular thought patterns due to lack of sleep), basically it's saying that Parents are the ones that are responsible for their children. They need to teach them common sense and about things when they ask or when the time is appropriate. If you haven't caught the drift of generations of repitition, trying to block things out totally from the lives of your children can cause irreversible damage to the parent-child relationship and possibly to their psyche. It pisses them off because they don't understand why you didn't just talk to them about it or for the simple fact that you denied them the right to surf freely while millions of other people can. Who knows. Maybe they'd even hit that.001% chance and turn psycho and kill half of the people in a department store when they're 22 because you sheltered them all their lives and they couldn't cope with the real world.
I highly doubt I conveyed my whole opinion there since my train of thought jumps between different things about once every few seconds, but hopefully you got my drift.
I know this is off-topic, but I dunno where to post it, and I wanted to put it somewhere where most./ers would see because it's kinda funny.
In this picture, if you take off the moustache, I swear that mahir "I kiss you!" guy looks a lot like CmdrTaco. It's scary. Go ahead and moderate it down if you want, but I can't think of anywhere else to post it.
I kinda left that comment sparse since I wrote it right before I had to go to school, but basically what I did for the drives was remove some of the old mounting hardware from my cases and I bolted it onto the L-bars that make up the rack case. I positioned an L-bar in the case so all i'd have to do is pull out the case half way, unscrew a bolt, and remove that drive mount from the case. For the power supply, I used a few small L-bars to make a sort of "chassie" for the power supply (which are hotswappables made for rack cases). This way, if one of the supplies decides to die, i unscrew a bolt from the rear, pull out the power supply, and pop in another one. It was tricky mounting it so it wouldn't try to pull all the cables with it, but I managed to get it done. The cases aren't exactly the prettiest things, but I have easy access to add/remove most anything i need.
I wish I could post pictures, but I don't have access to a scanner or digital camera. I'm one of the poorer geeks out there who has the unfortunality of living where no one I know has a computer with a bunch of schweet gadgets. I really haven't been able to buy any playthings for my computers. Hell, the only reason I have multiple computers is because I recycle when I upgrade. One old 486, two pentiums, a celeron, and a PII. All the stuff I've collected over the past 7 years I've basically kept and used. Very few parts lie around my house save a couple of old modems and an extra nic and power supply.:-(
I myself, tired of all my machines lying around, took it upon myself one day to go to the local metal shop. I bought some of those L-bar things (those l-shaped bars with all the holes in them so you can bolt just about anywhere on them) and some sheet metal to cover it with. I bolted them together and covered it with sheet metal to make it look all pretty. From there I threw out my old cases and made my own rack-mount cases, complete with hotswappability via the removal of a bolt or two from internal mountings. Those L-bars come in handy too, cause then I can just slide the new cases in and bolt them at the front. Of course, the back of the rack is still open so i could easily hook up the wires. All topped with a converted deskfan on the top to pull air through and keep things cool. This works well and came at just the fraction of the cost of a "real" rack and cases. I wonder how many other handygeeks out there have done something like this.:-)
'Nuff said in the subject. If you don't say, act, or do things like the masses, you're a threat to their well-being. You don't play sports? You don't use the word 'like' once every three words? You don't wear all the clothes that cost over $50 a pop? You ""not one with jesus?"" You despise rap? You think puff daddy should go through public castration? Then you're a threat to their conformist well-being. They must make you conform to their standards or you might be a threat. Have they ever thought that pushing conformity and alienation like with this so-called 'geek profile' that it might be their worst mistake?
Obviously someone's not thinking. But of course, if _you_ are, that's another threat to the conformist well-being. They don't like people who can think for themselves.
The vicious cycle starts in schools. Mr A is, well, 'different.' He dosen't like rap, he prefers to be by himself, and he prefers cheap shirts displaying his affection for his favorite bands like Pantera, Machine head, Metallica, etc...
Mr A arrives in jr high school. Being on the pudgy side, many people ridicule him for being fat and wearing different 'satanic' clothes. During math class, the teacher has a hard time with rowdy kids and calls Mr. A stupid because he can't get a problem that seems relatively simple. There's more being made fun of during lunch, while sitting with 4 of his friends whom are a lot like him. After lunch, in the bathroom, they get beat up for the umpteenth time. Life is like this a lot of the time for Mr. A, so he finds a savior in computers. They don't make fun of him, don't talk back, they just take information in and spit imore of t out, all objectively.
Mr. A arrives in highschool. Here, many people don't care how people act or look, they're too self-absorbed. This delights Mr. A. As year goes on though, a group of about 50-80 kids who still seem to not be able to comprehend what the word 'maturity' means still harasses Mr. A and his friends. People constantly ask them why they act like they do and why they wear the clothes they wear. Teachers and counselors are always questioning them. Some have even been called up to the office and interrogated about bomb threats to the school. All this helps to fuel the alienation and now Mr. A uses computers more than ever. He constantly talks on IRC with people who don't care how he looks. He gets into making web pages, graphics, programming, and various other little tidbits. He becomes extremely proficient in many programming languages and starts making a lot of money. He's finally found something he really likes.
Now Mr. A has been a pretty calm guy about everything. He's kept his cool. Until one day someone wouldn't stop bothering him during a class. He asks the teacher if he can move because of it, but she makes a snide remark. To escalate the problem, he's called up to the office and interrogated about his habits of being on the computer every waking minute he's not at school. !!!PING!!! That's the last straw for Mr. A. That day all the years of ridicule and pestering about being different and being himself have caused Mr. A to finally not be able to stand it anymore. Mr. A easily acquires an automatic submachine gun. Mr. A goes to school and plays target practice with all the people who have ridiculed him for being different. Mr. A then targets the teachers who have treated him badly. Then, fearing jail, turns the gun on himself.
It all goes back to one thing. He didn't conform to the standards of the immature masses at schools, therefore he was ridiculed and bullied. After so much of it, the mental strain on him is too great. His formerly intelligent judgement goes down the drain and all he wants is for it all to stop. Since he's lost his good judgement, the word 'gun' pops in his head. Sure, it's a little far-fetched, but this is just an example. I see the threat from someone's own classmates and teachers a bigger problem that your normal geek. They have the potential of shaping a person's personality by influence, proving fatal in the above scenario.
Finally, a project that has been needing to come around. A translator that's fast AND accurate. Best of all, it lets you correct phrases! Babelfish better stick around though.. i always get a kick out of doing things like translating
'I like to soak my feet in gallons of whipped vanilla pudding'
and having it finally come out as
'I appreciate to impregnate my feet in the gallons of the pudding that I have exposed to the flash of the vaniglia.'
If you're concerned about it and have linux, you could swear up and down about it if you want, but that's not doing ya much good. Send them a lovely polite email stating your concerns and how you feel about undocumented 'features' like this. Then just route the ip(s)/subnet to lo and go on with your insane fragging. (Hopefully it won't lock up while trying to send the info 8-)
Something like this is trivial, but I agree with the potential for it to eventually snowball into more and more information gathered if left out of check.
Alas... i wish i hadn't sold my Amiga. Those are nifty little things. You'll have to excuse me. Maybe i should've went to bed about 14 hours ago.
"And these Web appliances could yet break Microsoft and Intel's domination of the desktop computer market."
What a strong revelation. AOL _is_ a major company, but isn't that stretching it a bit? Sure, I could see a resurgance(is that a word?) with Amiga.. especially with AOL involved.. maybe Gateway will make up for where Mr. Chowaniec lacked in marketing ability. But breaking through the strong 20 foot high diamond shard encrusted walls of the bigwigs like M$ and Intel would require a lot of firepower. I'm no business whiz, but it would probably take years to get to that point. If they're lucky enough to get that far. Maybe if they pick up a giant stuffed loveable aardvark name Freddie as their mascot they can win over the kiddies!
This whole idea of "licenses" is kinda funny. Anonymity has been one of the key roles in the spread of the internet for many a normal luser; used as a way to "get away from the real world" and chat with other people or feed their hardcore porn habits under the dark cloak of bits and bytes spewing from their internet connection.
Sure, there are people who will ruin it for everyone by doing some seriously dumb stuff because they got bored, want to make a statement, wanted to get noticed, or whatever other reason. But giving out a "license" isn't really going to help. They can be easily stolen, cracked, modified, god knows what else. Learn from Micro$oft: Licensing dosen't work. For every dollar of profit they make, they lose probably 10-30 cents from pirating because many people out there don't want to pay for their overpriced, oozing-with-legal-jargon-that-most-average-people- don't-understand licenses that are required to _legally_ use the software.
Rob has a definate professional attitude towards his postings. He's definately an excellent journalist. I'm not saying that the others are any better or worse, but I believe he probably takes more time to think out things before he takes action. That is hard to do with the fact of "People want to know" always nagging in the back of your mind. That desire to please the info-hungry community with a tidbit of something can occasionally allow a misjudgement to slip through the cracks.
People make their mistakes. The/. authors are humans just like everyone else. Bruce is just as popular to the Open Source community as Cher is to the music industry, so a few articles are bound to show up in any medium that may cause "problems." We should just look at it as a rash judgemental call from Bruce and not let it all get out of hand. He admitted his mistake, now we should just go on to the next story of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to real-time processing IT. Where you either know your shit soup-to-nuts or go home crying to mommy. :D
Disk will always be. Since disk is your slowest spot you will always be disk I/O bound. So in effect there's no real reason to worry about network throughput from the NIC. NICs are efficient enough these days to just about never get bogged down. What you would want to look at for the network side would be your physical topology -- make sure you have a nice switch with nice backplane throughput.
About disks:
Your average fibre channel drive will top out at 300 IO/s because few people sell drives that can write any faster to the spindle (cost prohibitive for several reasons). Cache helps this out greatly. SATA is slightly slower at between 240-270 IO/s depending on manufacturer and type.
Your throughput will depend totally upon what type of IO is hitting your NAS and how you have it all configured (RAID type, cache size, etc). If you have a lot of random IO, your total throughput will be low once you've saturated your cache. Reads will always be worse than writes even though prefetching helps.
If you're working with multi-gigabyte datasets, you'll want to increase the number of spindles (ie number of disks) to as high as you can go within your budget and make sure you have gobs of cache. If you decide to RAID it, which type you use will depend on how much integrity you need (we use a lot of RAID 10 with lots of spindles for many of our databases). That will speed you up significantly more than worrying about the NICs throughput. don't worry about that until you start topping a significant portion of your bandwidth -- for example, say 60MB/sec sustained over the wire.
This doesn't get fun until you start having to architect petabytes worth of disk. ;)
Tier-1/2 transit providers have been depeering and blackholing each other since the the Internet's infancy. Sometimes over as little as a squabble between the two companys' engineers. Usually it gets resolved quickly ($$$). Sometimes it doesn't. Seems like a stupid thing to do IMO since it is doing nothing but hurting their customers.
[SprintCust] Hey, we can't get to (insert CompanyB web application -- important to SprintCust's business) ... ...it's because of WHAT?
[SprintCust] *calls up CompanyB* Hey, is your application down? We're trying to do our business with you but we can't and we're losing a lot of money
[SprintCust]
[SprintCust]
[SprintCust] FUCK SPRINT
Then multiply that by a number whose product will cause the irritation of some upper managers and this will finally end -- they'll at least route traffic to them if they don't re-peer. (in theory -- i never said Sprint was a rational company)
Anybody have any ideas on why Sprint might pull a stunt like this as a means to GAIN FCC approval?
They're probably not. Sprint's wireless division isn't run by the same people as their transit network. It's most likely a case of left hand not knowing what the right is doing. If Cogent and Sprint are in litigation and Sprint decides to depeer or blackhole Cogent on their network because of that, it's most likely a decision made by upper management on the data transit infrastructure side and has nothing whatsoever to do with wireless.
I can bet you that the engineers assigned to do the work of depeering/blackholing probably think it's an utterly moronic thing to do... which is why they're not in management.
You'd probably want to check the SLA first. Most have provisions that don't apply to this, at least contractually. As an end-customer you'd be buying access to their public network -- if they choose to depeer or black hole another network, they're usually within the right to do that since THEY own the network you're connecting to. Bad business sense yeah, but otherwise it's probably not breaking any contractual agreement with a customer.
My company does transaction processing (think prepaid and reloadable debit cards, gift cards, etc) and as such our business is heavily IT-related.
I think we have something along the lines of 600 staff -- of those about 100-150 of those are IT-related. This isn't including project managers or anyone else who interface with IT who don't do IT-related work on a regular basis. 1:5.5-6 ratio.
I think it breaks down to something like this (my numbers are probably way off, I haven't seen an org chart in forever):
IT Operations (non-management)
Server Infrastructure: 7
Network Infrastructure: 5
Application Support (all tiers, from internal apps to customer-facing apps): ~20
DBAs: 3
Data analyst types (information systems): 10
Global Architecture (the omniscient overlords who guide IT ops): 4
Helpdesk: 4
NOC: 10-12
Overall IT Software Development (coders/QA/etc): ~40ish
Management: ~12
I'm on the operations side so the count on the software side is all guessing. The rest of the employee makeup includes folks such as accounting, finance, sales, marketing, call centers, PMs, etc. Essentially the business breaks down into either folks who get the money to our doorstep, folks who make sure the money keeps flowing, and folks who make the systems that make the money flow.
The numbers can be misleading though... not only because such a ratio isn't the best quantifier -- for my company's business, a ratio of IT staff to others doesn't really tell you much other than that our business is heavily technology-oriented. For example, we have a high number of application support analysts compared to the rest of IT ops but the ratio of support analysts to business customers is something along the lines of 1:1-2000 depending on certain factors. The network group fields requests from both external business customers and internal staff so our support ratio is something like 1:75 (much lower than app support thanks to how different external customers interface with us). The sysadmins manage a ~650 system (physical/virtual/zoned) environment at the tune of about 1:90 overall... but that's not necessarily true since that group includes a couple of folks who work primarily on *NIX and another guy whose sole reason for living is to manage about 250TB of SAN storage. The DBAs... well I'm not even going to go there.
I think, in managerspeak, the phrase is, "the number you get depends on the metric you're trying to track." For my company, its size, and its structure, the ratio is pretty reasonable. We probably have far too many developers but most of that's somewhat due to the amount of concurrent projects rolling at any given moment along with the utterly insane complexity of some of the code they're writing and maintaining. As far as other industries... hard to tell. Depends on the technology needs of the company and/or the amount it is technology-driven.
I'm surprised few have mentioned Entrust.
:)
They've been around about 11 years and have been rather superb for us. We switched to them from using Verisign because it seemed like paying almost a grand a year for a 128/256 validated cert was absolutely ridiculous. Entrust has just as much browser and application (e.g. JBoss) exposure as Verisign and their certs are only $159-199/yr (depending on how many certs you purchase). EV certs are considerably cheaper as well.
Granted it takes them a few business days for the first cert you order, subsequent orders seem to have a turnaround time of 24 hrs.
They work for us, they're relatively cheap, and they don't require chained certificates like some of the cheaper CAs that have popped up over the past few years. As always, do your research and compare the CAs once you've whittled down the short list.
Heh. One of the few front-page stories i've seen go over 1000 comments.
Time to contribute to wasting space in the sql server, I guess!
space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster space waster.
Remind me to never let any of my friends at my computer again.
Maybe I should have defined what I meant better.
I didn't mean blocking out as in "denying them the right to act upon something" such as consuming alcohol, having sexual intercourse, or stealing, etc. I meant denying them knowledge of it and what it does. I really think that having your parents speak to you about things is a lot better than learning it from the street.
I guess a good example of what i'm trying to say is this: I think a child with a parent who explained to them what sex is, the consequences, the potential health problems it can cause, and ways to prevent pregnancy and STDs would probably be better off than a child with parents who do nothing but preach abstinence and "sex is bad, mmkay?". We all have our opinions and mine is probably as biased as the next, but almost everyone I know that have parents who tried to inform and explain things to them at the appropriate times have turned out far better off than the ones who got to learn it from the world because their parents refused to acknowledge informing them about it. There are always the exceptions of course.
You know, whether or not this code was left in accidentally, left as a quick 'n' easy upgrade path for rollouts in other areas, or whatnot, there's one thing I can't help to think about one thing:
I bet that one (or more) of the designers just wanted to give the DVD CCA some actual multi-billion-dollar-revenue ass to try to kick so they'll think twice about screwing with the little guy.
Sure, the DeCSS thing may have been more of a big deal in a sense; but if they took the time to trace the link you put on your page that you got from your friend's brother's cousin's sister's friend's boyfriend and then pay a lawyer $450/hour to cite it on a legal document, then they're probably gonna gripe about this until someone decides they're tired of monopolistic punks and they go on a mass killing spree.
In real life, people are trying to legislate, sue or pay others to raise their children. Every plastic bag imprinted with "This is Not a Toy" is testament, as is every lawsuit suing heavy metal bands for responsibility for teen suicides.
And how many kids have you raised, buddy? Everybody's an expert until they actually try it.
Well, well, well. I have to say that in my few fleeting moments i've had in this mortal coil myself, I think I know what raising a kid must be like. I've done hundreds of babysitting jobs, many being overnight excursions while parents went too far away to get back before morning and whatnot. I've had to babysit children as young as 6 months; as old as 12 years. No doubt it is a hard thing to do to keep up with them (especially when you've got 4-6 on your hands at one time), but I seriously think that the angle of attack on the statement above is rather askew. For it is not the children's fault most of the time for many things. You must remember, their minds are still developing. This means that they must rely on someone else who is older to help them along. You have to teach them or else they can twist and contort things into weird perceptions. (Of course I'm speaking of smaller children here.)
People definately are attempting to legislate, sue, and pay others to raise their children and it sickens me. Plastic bags and other things that state "this is not a toy" is just a small example of it. "Well let's see, if it's not a toy, why don't I just give it to my son here to play with! While i'm at it, let me go buy him a bow and some arrows too!" Then they go and sue the companies because they were stupid enough to do such a thing and it all becomes a blame game. It's stupid. It's all damned common sense. If parents can't do their job teaching their kids common sense, right from wrong, red from purple, left from right, why do you expect the government to do it? If you're going to leave your child with the responsibility of surfing the internet without either supervising them yourself or teaching them about certain things they might find (depending upon age group), then it's the fault of the parent.
"Well do you think I can keep up with my child 24/7?" If you chose to have the child, you damn well should have thought about that, shouldn't you? Didn't plan on having him/her, it just popped up? Then making as much time as possible with your child should be first priority. Attention and teaching is everything to them. The way you bring them up in their early years of life has a lot to do with how they are in their pre-teens, teens, and beyond.
If you didn't catch the drift of all that for one reason or another (probably due to my irregular thought patterns due to lack of sleep), basically it's saying that Parents are the ones that are responsible for their children. They need to teach them common sense and about things when they ask or when the time is appropriate. If you haven't caught the drift of generations of repitition, trying to block things out totally from the lives of your children can cause irreversible damage to the parent-child relationship and possibly to their psyche. It pisses them off because they don't understand why you didn't just talk to them about it or for the simple fact that you denied them the right to surf freely while millions of other people can. Who knows. Maybe they'd even hit that .001% chance and turn psycho and kill half of the people in a department store when they're 22 because you sheltered them all their lives and they couldn't cope with the real world.
I highly doubt I conveyed my whole opinion there since my train of thought jumps between different things about once every few seconds, but hopefully you got my drift.
I know this is off-topic, but I dunno where to post it, and I wanted to put it somewhere where most ./ers would see because it's kinda funny.
In this picture, if you take off the moustache, I swear that mahir "I kiss you!" guy looks a lot like CmdrTaco. It's scary. Go ahead and moderate it down if you want, but I can't think of anywhere else to post it.
I kinda left that comment sparse since I wrote it right before I had to go to school, but basically what I did for the drives was remove some of the old mounting hardware from my cases and I bolted it onto the L-bars that make up the rack case. I positioned an L-bar in the case so all i'd have to do is pull out the case half way, unscrew a bolt, and remove that drive mount from the case. For the power supply, I used a few small L-bars to make a sort of "chassie" for the power supply (which are hotswappables made for rack cases). This way, if one of the supplies decides to die, i unscrew a bolt from the rear, pull out the power supply, and pop in another one. It was tricky mounting it so it wouldn't try to pull all the cables with it, but I managed to get it done. The cases aren't exactly the prettiest things, but I have easy access to add/remove most anything i need.
:-(
I wish I could post pictures, but I don't have access to a scanner or digital camera. I'm one of the poorer geeks out there who has the unfortunality of living where no one I know has a computer with a bunch of schweet gadgets. I really haven't been able to buy any playthings for my computers. Hell, the only reason I have multiple computers is because I recycle when I upgrade. One old 486, two pentiums, a celeron, and a PII. All the stuff I've collected over the past 7 years I've basically kept and used. Very few parts lie around my house save a couple of old modems and an extra nic and power supply.
I myself, tired of all my machines lying around, took it upon myself one day to go to the local metal shop. I bought some of those L-bar things (those l-shaped bars with all the holes in them so you can bolt just about anywhere on them) and some sheet metal to cover it with. I bolted them together and covered it with sheet metal to make it look all pretty. From there I threw out my old cases and made my own rack-mount cases, complete with hotswappability via the removal of a bolt or two from internal mountings. Those L-bars come in handy too, cause then I can just slide the new cases in and bolt them at the front. Of course, the back of the rack is still open so i could easily hook up the wires. All topped with a converted deskfan on the top to pull air through and keep things cool. This works well and came at just the fraction of the cost of a "real" rack and cases. I wonder how many other handygeeks out there have done something like this. :-)
'Nuff said in the subject. If you don't say, act, or do things like the masses, you're a threat to their well-being. You don't play sports? You don't use the word 'like' once every three words? You don't wear all the clothes that cost over $50 a pop? You ""not one with jesus?"" You despise rap? You think puff daddy should go through public castration? Then you're a threat to their conformist well-being. They must make you conform to their standards or you might be a threat. Have they ever thought that pushing conformity and alienation like with this so-called 'geek profile' that it might be their worst mistake?
Obviously someone's not thinking. But of course, if _you_ are, that's another threat to the conformist well-being. They don't like people who can think for themselves.
The vicious cycle starts in schools. Mr A is, well, 'different.' He dosen't like rap, he prefers to be by himself, and he prefers cheap shirts displaying his affection for his favorite bands like Pantera, Machine head, Metallica, etc...
Mr A arrives in jr high school. Being on the pudgy side, many people ridicule him for being fat and wearing different 'satanic' clothes. During math class, the teacher has a hard time with rowdy kids and calls Mr. A stupid because he can't get a problem that seems relatively simple. There's more being made fun of during lunch, while sitting with 4 of his friends whom are a lot like him. After lunch, in the bathroom, they get beat up for the umpteenth time. Life is like this a lot of the time for Mr. A, so he finds a savior in computers. They don't make fun of him, don't talk back, they just take information in and spit imore of t out, all objectively.
Mr. A arrives in highschool. Here, many people don't care how people act or look, they're too self-absorbed. This delights Mr. A. As year goes on though, a group of about 50-80 kids who still seem to not be able to comprehend what the word 'maturity' means still harasses Mr. A and his friends. People constantly ask them why they act like they do and why they wear the clothes they wear. Teachers and counselors are always questioning them. Some have even been called up to the office and interrogated about bomb threats to the school. All this helps to fuel the alienation and now Mr. A uses computers more than ever. He constantly talks on IRC with people who don't care how he looks. He gets into making web pages, graphics, programming, and various other little tidbits. He becomes extremely proficient in many programming languages and starts making a lot of money. He's finally found something he really likes.
Now Mr. A has been a pretty calm guy about everything. He's kept his cool. Until one day someone wouldn't stop bothering him during a class. He asks the teacher if he can move because of it, but she makes a snide remark. To escalate the problem, he's called up to the office and interrogated about his habits of being on the computer every waking minute he's not at school. !!!PING!!! That's the last straw for Mr. A. That day all the years of ridicule and pestering about being different and being himself have caused Mr. A to finally not be able to stand it anymore. Mr. A easily acquires an automatic submachine gun. Mr. A goes to school and plays target practice with all the people who have ridiculed him for being different. Mr. A then targets the teachers who have treated him badly. Then, fearing jail, turns the gun on himself.
It all goes back to one thing. He didn't conform to the standards of the immature masses at schools, therefore he was ridiculed and bullied. After so much of it, the mental strain on him is too great. His formerly intelligent judgement goes down the drain and all he wants is for it all to stop. Since he's lost his good judgement, the word 'gun' pops in his head. Sure, it's a little far-fetched, but this is just an example. I see the threat from someone's own classmates and teachers a bigger problem that your normal geek. They have the potential of shaping a person's personality by influence, proving fatal in the above scenario.
Finally, a project that has been needing to come around. A translator that's fast AND accurate. Best of all, it lets you correct phrases! Babelfish better stick around though.. i always get a kick out of doing things like translating
'I like to soak my feet in gallons of whipped vanilla pudding'
and having it finally come out as
'I appreciate to impregnate my feet in the gallons of the pudding that I have exposed to the flash of the vaniglia.'
If you're concerned about it and have linux, you could swear up and down about it if you want, but that's not doing ya much good. Send them a lovely polite email stating your concerns and how you feel about undocumented 'features' like this. Then just route the ip(s)/subnet to lo and go on with your insane fragging. (Hopefully it won't lock up while trying to send the info 8-)
Something like this is trivial, but I agree with the potential for it to eventually snowball into more and more information gathered if left out of check.
Alas... i wish i hadn't sold my Amiga. Those are nifty little things. You'll have to excuse me. Maybe i should've went to bed about 14 hours ago.
"And these Web appliances could yet break Microsoft and Intel's domination of the desktop computer market."
What a strong revelation. AOL _is_ a major company, but isn't that stretching it a bit? Sure, I could see a resurgance(is that a word?) with Amiga.. especially with AOL involved.. maybe Gateway will make up for where Mr. Chowaniec lacked in marketing ability. But breaking through the strong 20 foot high diamond shard encrusted walls of the bigwigs like M$ and Intel would require a lot of firepower. I'm no business whiz, but it would probably take years to get to that point. If they're lucky enough to get that far. Maybe if they pick up a giant stuffed loveable aardvark name Freddie as their mascot they can win over the kiddies!
This whole idea of "licenses" is kinda funny. Anonymity has been one of the key roles in the spread of the internet for many a normal luser; used as a way to "get away from the real world" and chat with other people or feed their hardcore porn habits under the dark cloak of bits and bytes spewing from their internet connection.
- don't-understand licenses that are required to _legally_ use the software.
Sure, there are people who will ruin it for everyone by doing some seriously dumb stuff because they got bored, want to make a statement, wanted to get noticed, or whatever other reason. But giving out a "license" isn't really going to help. They can be easily stolen, cracked, modified, god knows what else. Learn from Micro$oft: Licensing dosen't work. For every dollar of profit they make, they lose probably 10-30 cents from pirating because many people out there don't want to pay for their overpriced, oozing-with-legal-jargon-that-most-average-people
Rob has a definate professional attitude towards his postings. He's definately an excellent journalist. I'm not saying that the others are any better or worse, but I believe he probably takes more time to think out things before he takes action. That is hard to do with the fact of "People want to know" always nagging in the back of your mind. That desire to please the info-hungry community with a tidbit of something can occasionally allow a misjudgement to slip through the cracks.
/. authors are humans just like everyone else. Bruce is just as popular to the Open Source community as Cher is to the music industry, so a few articles are bound to show up in any medium that may cause "problems." We should just look at it as a rash judgemental call from Bruce and not let it all get out of hand. He admitted his mistake, now we should just go on to the next story of interest.
People make their mistakes. The