In this case, "we" is the mostly highly paranoid segment of the people possibly involved. The tinfoil segment has been blowing things out of proportion for years. If you replaced "government agents" with "aliens" and "laptop" with "anal probe" it would be damn near the same argument, and nobody would be paying attention.
This is completely overblown because TFA needs to generate some traffic. Before you start declaring the US a police state on principle, you should be asking yourself...if you have important data on your laptop, -why isn't it already encrypted?- If you're encrypting data strictly because of the TSA, -YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG-.
"I am tired of these motherf***ing worms on this motherfu***ing planet." From "Arrakis: The Ecology", Imperial Planetologist Jackson
Clearly, the cast is as follows:
Paul - Will Smith Duke Leto - The guy who played Paul in 84 (Desperate Housewives...) Jessica - Angelina Jolie Stilgar - Hugh Jackman, complete with adamantium. Chani - Lucy Lui Alia - Dakota Fanning
You guys are all nuts. The 1984 version of Dune sucked so unbelievably hard. I have read Dune literally dozens of times (and each sequel slightly less thereafter.) I recently finished a complete re-read of the entire original 6 + the KJA/BH 7, AND watched Dune on VHS.
I think people are mistaking "bad" for "nuanced"; I was trying to explain to my girlfriend, who has never read Dune but is by no means stupid, what is going on. It was completely impossible. The only thing that I could get across to her was that Paul was the semi-penultimate step in a breeding program that took thousands of years. And now he's on Desperate Housewives.
I work with a guy who was at Dune on opening night. They handed out vocabulary cards at the theater. That's not "deep and mysterious Sci-Fi", that's bad movie direction.
Dune'84 is a piece of shit. I never would have read the book had I seen the movie first because it was clearly directed by a raving lunatic. The only saving grace is that the Evil Guys were genuinely evil and brilliant actors. GG Sting.
Also, they threw away Duncan's first life without ever explaining why he was even important.
"KWIK, TO THE WEIRD FLYING THING!" "Duncan dyed, LOL!"
Sci-Fi's version was much more watchable. Sci-Fi's Children of Dune was fantastic (in no small part thanks to Brian Tyler's soundtrack).
I'm not saying they have to explain everything in the movie, but Dune: Sting Edition lost all credibility with me when the Navigator first shows up. He reminds me too much of Mer-Man, Skeletor's fishy sidekick.
I was the president of the university UNIX User's Group in Harrisonburg (about 2 hours away) and we decided to go as a "field trip". For a bunch of UNIX nerds, let me tell you, the NSA Crypto Museum is a religious experience. It was probably the most excited some of us had been in years. The people there were *awesome*; you could tell they were genuinely happy to have a bunch of "kids" that were super-excited to be there. I had my picture taken with the working Enigma (replica?) they have on display. Using it, standing next to it, hugging it. A good friend of mine got his picture taken while "licking" the Cray. There was a older man in full uniform volunteering..he followed us around and laughed like crazy.
I have to imagine that a large number of people go there because it's "Something to do" or because one guy in the family read Cryptonomicon recently. When I told the guy we'd driven for 4 hours *just* for the Crypto Museum he got this look of wonder in his eye. It was a fantastic experience; take a group of friends that really like those sort of things because there's a *lot* of "boring stuff" if you don't. Mock-ups of Vietnam listening posts, a history of the Enigma cracking project...beautiful.
I like your theory : ) I've been in datacenters where there were "black" rooms and nobody could get in to. But a lot of non-government entities need that sort of thing. Banks and stock exchanges certainly like to have blackout rooms, and the government has them for non-spying-on-citizens stuff.
The problem was that even after RTFA'ing I didn't buy his creditability. I'm sure it happens. But there's a bunch of other explanations for it without having to unleash my Power of Paranoia...which I assure you is quite powerful ; )
Because you'd still have to reroute traffic to the routers that the fiber is connected to, and that takes precious milliseconds. And a lot of your traffic would mysteriously start going through NOCs that are totally unnecessary. Because there's no way they could do it to *every* POP at every Tier1 or 2 provider.
I'm not going to claim it's not happening, but this is not the guy to listen to. I don't want to be a dick about this, but he's not a network engineer, he's not a network admin, he's not a data specialist...he's a cable splicer. He does VDV work for AT&T. Is it possible, if not likely, that he maybe doesn't have a complete understanding of how all the tubes work past Layer 1? (And just to really be a dick about it, every VDV person I've met claims to be a data network expert because they lay the wires. Ask one why Ethernet is limited to 100M by spec and watch the fun.)
With only 20 of those facilities, and just in AT&T locations, the fibertaps wouldn't even have a significant percentage of traffic going through them. Do some traceroutes; do some ping tests; Try it from different providers. They would have to be routing all traffic through those points. Your ping times would know, and the global BGP tables would know.
I have a comfortable tinfoil hat. What I *could* be easily convinced of is that the NSA has taps on all oceanic fiber. That's much easier to do, since there's not all that many. And...frankly, they should be. We pay them a lot of money to keep us safe. A *lot* of money. But I don't think this is the guy to listen to regarding something this big and damning.
Which crap? That Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia would like to see the west fail as superpowers?
That they publicly or covertly sponsor terrorism from state coffers?
That their leaders (except the Saudis) explicitly state that a goal of their government is to destroy the United States?
That it takes more than one or two atomic weapons to kill thousands (if not millions) of people?
That the United States has the right, as any country, to defend themselves from attack...without first becoming a martyr?
That Iraq (pre-war) and Iran would probably not say "Oh..wow, you guys want stuff to make atomic weapons? Man...I really wish I could help, but I'm dealing with all this shit from Bill Clinton..."
That a significant portion of Americans are willing to believe that George Bush is the head of the largest conspiracy ever created on US soil, but that Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah are too stupid to buy active Antrax and Uranium?
That somewhere in Syria, Iraq, or Iran are there at least 10 scientists capable of engineering a nuclear reactor without help from the US or Russia? And that somewhere, perhaps in the same place, perhaps not, are 10 other scientists capable of building a delivery vessel?
The only part that I don't believe is that you were in the White House and the Defense Department while they were planning for the war; either you were, or you're entire opinion is based on what you've seen and read through laughably filtered sources...just like me.
If, however, you are a General that was in charge of planning and know, for a fact, that you only planned for two months, then I retract my statement. But in that case, I do blame you, entirely, for the situation we're in now.
Now is definitely *not* the time to attack Iran, and I certainly want to avoid it at all cost, but Iraq just happens to be a very nice long-term strategy for a staging ground, don't you think?
I think the answer to this question is how much of other American's blood you're willing to spill before you can declare a war Rightous and Defensive. Someattacks have already occurred. They were perpetrated by by Islamic extremist *that were harbored by nations like Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. In some cases (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia), they country is officially an "ally". In other cases (Syria, Iran, Iraq), the country is run by a government -known to specifically desire the destruction of the United States-.
Didn't anyone ever tell you that the best defense is a good offense?
Iraq and Iran had/have clear, well-established goals; predominantly, the fall of the West as a superpower. That includes the US, Canada, and Europe. They don't have to make direct, military confrontation because 1) the leaders don't buy into most of Islam themselves and 2) they have a ready-made paramilitary group that the can fund semi-overtly.
If Iran or Syria managed to acquire nuclear weapons (this is pretty much a given at this point, considering the vast number of unaccounted nukes after the fall of the USSR) they have to figure out one, *exactly 1*, way to get a high-yield nuclear weapon into the United States. Either New York or LA is the most likely target; probably LA this time.
That is why Iraq was a threat. Iraq also had the weakest military and the strongest pro-American sentiment among the populace, with Iran as a close second. So you have a country with a minor threat (much less than Iran or Syria) BUT WITH POPULAR SUPPORT AND A VASTLY INFERIOR MILITARY. Who *do* you attack first?
Now, within 5 years we'll have a solid base of operations in Iraq to stage much less costly and more easily defended attacks into Iraq and Syria.
As far as WMDs, here, let me give you a thought exercise.
I live in Virginia. Somewhere in Virginia I have hidden a white 1987 Chevy 2500HD van. You know I have it; the UN knows I have it, the UN inspectors know I have it. I buy gas for it. I buy replacement parts for it, but *you have never seen the van*. I refuse to show you the van. If I can get this van to a major African, European, or Asian city, I can drive it wherever it needs to go. The van represents an unknown threat.
PS: Sorry, I lied....I can also move it anywhere in West Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, DC, or Tennessee; I know people there who have just as big of an interest in getting the Van to Europe as I do.
Find the van.
Oh...the van doesn't exist? You have looked at every square inch of Virginia? I lied to you about the van?
I have a moral compunction against badmouthing somebody when they can't defend themselves. I also have a somewhat higher-than-normal access to the problem than other folks because I've done consulting work for this guy in the past. The consulting work is how I realized that he's an idiot; now every time I hear of Harrisonburg trying to do something retarded with computers, I can virtually *guarantee* that his name will appear as the first quote.
I have no problem naming him in the public paper, because I assume he can read. But I really doubt he actually knows how to use a computer, much less has heard of Slashdot. The odd thing was, I went to a CDW-G event a few weeks ago and all 7 IT mover's-n-shakers in HB were there. One mention of this guy's name had people laughing in the isles. He's a laughingstock of technology in this area, but 1) he works for the local university so you can't outright say he's an idiot and 2) he's old and knows lots of people.
Of course, this raises an interesting question...should anybody be developing technology solutions if they're unaware of slashdot?
I've been throwing around the idea of starting a push in my local paper to create an (unpaid) elected official to oversee Stupid IT Tricks in my bassakwards town. I would run for it. I think it would be fun : )
My fair city recently fell for this kind of scam. 802.11x is basically the absolute worst wireless spec to try and deploy over any area larger than a medium-sized house. Massive interference; everything from cordless phones to microwave ovens. Leaves destroy 90% of the signal. Leaves with fresh rain on them completely destroy even multipath.
Our city tried so that it could attract high-tech workers. They were gunning for a "revolutionary" wireless deployment using IP6 so they could do multicast groups with video. Over WiFi backhaul. F'ing brilliant. Even though Harrisonburg has some truly epic fails, in *this* case they did okay. They gave permission for a private company to do it, but refused to actually *pay* for them to do it. Naturally, the company failed.
The system was originally pitched as an offshoot of the electric company's fiber ring. The municipal wireless wasn't supposed to be about ubiquitous laptop and PDA internet. They were going to use Better Stuff (Motorola Canopy, or Navini, maybe) to create a city utility network. ISPs could sign up to provide internet and pay the city a fee per customer that signs up. In that way, fixed broadband last-mile backhauls *actually make sense*, though perhaps not financially.
Somehow, though, it turned into a "WiFi Cloud".
This is mostly due to one technology "adviser" from the local university that is a *complete* moron. I'm not sure how much money he makes off of recommending worthless technology ideas, but we'll just say that "Harrisonburg IP6 Wireless Network" was not his dumbest idea by a long shot.
That's good, because I paid a hell of a lot of money for my copies of Office & Windows. They are not "cheap" by any regard, so that is eliminated from your (very accurate) list. We should be approaching "fast and good" at any release now...
+1. It was a complete non-story, but it does go to prove one great thing about America: any idiot with a [microphone|camera|keyboard] can be heard, parroted, and divert the entire country away from important things.
Seconded. Vtiger is an excellent system that's based on a fork of SugarCRM from a while back. I've been running it for about 8 months production and I've been extremely happy with it. You can make custom fields for time tracking and cheat a little bit to get asset management. Overall, B+/A-
We have roughly the same setup, except that we're a small outsourced IT company. After messing with craptastic CRM systems for about a year, I eventually settled on one called VTiger. It's easy to setup, very straightforward to use. Customizing is kind of a pain; it's written very well but it's a steep learning curve for the design. But it is PHP/MySQL, and we've been very happy with it.
The multipart crapfest that was Usenet of 2000 has been replaced with the absolute brilliance that is newzbin. http://v3.newzbin.com/
But I think they've stopped accepting users. I think Newzbin and Giganews Unlimited has done more to resurrect Usenet as a viable file transfer medium (read as: "theft engine") than anything since NNTP was designed. They pull $1 every 2 weeks and have a peer-edited review system. I even gank all my Linux isos from Giganews because they can sustain 550kps to my desktop. BT rarely, if ever, can pull that off.
This isn't true, though, especially for businesses. Even small businesses are using MS SBS (Small Business Server) which uses Exchange. Exchange needs Outlook to function as anything useable. OO has no Outlook replacement. *every single bit* of new code and work should be going into making an Outlook replacement that works *with Exchange*. Saying that OpenOffice can replace MS Office, at this time, is a complete lie, and not the direction we want to take this in.
For personal use, OO is pretty good, but it's still not ready for massive advertisement and downloads. Think of it this way: you have the option of downloading OpenOffice for Free, or Microsoft Office for Free. You install both..but which do you use? At the present (assuming I were in Windows) I would use Word.
This is nothing against the OO team. They do a tremendous job; but it's not *quite* at the point where I could unleash it on my mom (or, perhaps unleash my mom on it.)
I've been using VMWare Workstation and GSX (now just "Server") very successfully under Linux. I have two virtualized Linux and three virtualized 2003 Server instances on a 2x Opteron 240. It works wonderfully.
However, to be honest, on a laptop it likely makes more sense to run the host as WinXP. With Linux hosting and XP in Vmware, you don't get hardware graphics acceleration (perhaps in either OS.) Linux and laptops are still not there yet, so you may as well use XP as the host OS and get full hardware support.
Mine was a very generalized guideline as not to water down a political discussion with tech. In reality, we did a lot of per-user shaping, but it's of limited use. Assume you have a 10Mbit link @ 1,500 a month. If you're selling DSL @ 29.95 a month, you break even on the 50th subscriber. But if each DSL sold at 768k download, the industry standard when we were doing DSL, 14 users at max download speed saturate the entire link. You can't hard-throttle somebody at lower than what they paid for, that really *is* straight-out fraud. But you can use priority tables in such a way that P2P has many times less chance of getting through a network than a ping.
Ugh, my GRAMMAH on that was HORRIBLE. Never write a post when you're in a hurry:(
For people who have never been behind the scenes..
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ISP Rise Against P2P Users
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I've managed two ISPs, one a Dialup/DSL and the other a WISP in the last two years, and I can assure the/. crowd that bandwidth throttling is nothing new, and you're probably all already subjected to it anyway.
Pretty much any ISP that's ever had to face a legal problem has somewhere in their contract/TOS/AUP that the service is a "best effort", regardless of anything else you may have heard. It's kind of like the "NO WARANTEE WHATSOEVER" clause in the GPL; it's designed to keep ISPs from getting sued in the event that downtime causes a business to lose a contract or something similar.
Pretty much every ISP that's smaller than 10k people keeps an "Abusive User" list. ISPs sell bandwidth based on average usage multiplied by their bandwidth an oversubscription rate. When somebody is some amount over the average (say, 2 STDDEVs), they got throw in the "Abusive User" pile. The way we handled it was to set Abusers entire traffic pipe as one priority above "bulk".
Anything not classified as "Good" data (HTTP, SMTP, POP3/IMAP, etc) got assigned to "Bulk". Therefore, an Abusive's entire pipe had a lower priority then a normal sub's "Good" traffic.
In this case, our "best effort" was to provide a better service to the vast number of people who do *not* download 10 gigs of newsgroups a day. If the Abusive actually canceled there account, that's *great*, because we were losing money on them anyway and could now pack 20-30 Normals into the bandwidth they were previously using.
Also, if you check in your contract, most are worded so that the bandwidth cap is advertised as the "up to" speed. Basically, it means: "Due to how the Internet operates, we cannot garanutee you any maximum speed. We can, however, garantee you that it will never be over _______ Kbps, as that is the service you have purchased."
So the moral of the story is: If you download 20 gigs a day, your ISP would probably rather you leave anyway, because they're losing money on you.
What is it about the internet that makes people so damn lazy? Why should somebody else have to verify your made-up statistics? If you can't be bothered to find some crackpot webpage to back them up, don't bother making them up in the first place.
You don't to use hardly any of the commandline functions once you know how to use the shell client. 95% of people will only ever use mysqladmin and mysqldump. All the functionality they need is built into the mysql command shell. I think the real difference is that the mysql command shell (versus psql) seems closer to a natural language interface. I mean, "show databases" is pretty straightforward and intuitive. "show tables", too.
With normal PHP development all the "Advanced features" of either postgres or mysql are basically dropped by the wayside and ignored. You shouldn't rely on data types and integrity checks in the database for web applications; your form processing should have already checked all that or you're leaving your self open to SQL injection, XSS problems and really crappy error messages. Very few people even use joins!
Bottom line is that most people (like me) use mysql because it's fast and easy, and we really just want one step above flatfile. I have a lot of experience with Postgres, MSSQL, Oracle, and flatfile. I'll go to MySQL every time.
I've used one in the US at an installation, but I'm not sure exactly how much I can say about it. We were considering buying one and requested a demo of a live site by the company.
Navini has a couple dozen, maybe 100, maybe more installations in the states. They use an antenna array, proprietary and disturbingly expensive multi-antenna controller, and some patented version of orthoganal beam forming. They also only sell one unlicensed product in the 2.4 range. The rest are from 2.1-2.3, 2.6, and a 5.x that I don't recall.
In our real life tests on a live system, the portable USB/ethernet modem device was good for about 5-6 miles outdoors in a moving vehicle, and 2-3 miles if it was indoors. The entire backplane was 12MBps..which as anybody will tell you, under load, will barely qualify as "Broadband."
Additionally, a telco has deployed an older Navini system where I live. It..doesn't work so well inside. It *does* work, however, with a laptop and a modem about anywhere in town (their installation is on a *very* high peak).
Overall, we decided against the system because it just didn't perform that well. It would have been a multi-hundred-thousand dollar install, potentially, for a 12Mbit backplan to deliver rural-only broadband. Navini, though, has done amazing work and real-life data aside, the implementation is brilliantly conceived. It's not exactly WiMax. Since the WiMax 'standard' is still sort of....*shrug*...they can say about anyting they want. It's similar to the standard, and it does work in some limited fashion...but it's still wireless.
Slashdot Mirror
"We are discussing.."
In this case, "we" is the mostly highly paranoid segment of the people possibly involved. The tinfoil segment has been blowing things out of proportion for years. If you replaced "government agents" with "aliens" and "laptop" with "anal probe" it would be damn near the same argument, and nobody would be paying attention.
This is completely overblown because TFA needs to generate some traffic. Before you start declaring the US a police state on principle, you should be asking yourself...if you have important data on your laptop, -why isn't it already encrypted?- If you're encrypting data strictly because of the TSA, -YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG-.
"I am tired of these motherf***ing worms on this motherfu***ing planet."
From "Arrakis: The Ecology", Imperial Planetologist Jackson
Clearly, the cast is as follows:
Paul - Will Smith
Duke Leto - The guy who played Paul in 84 (Desperate Housewives...)
Jessica - Angelina Jolie
Stilgar - Hugh Jackman, complete with adamantium.
Chani - Lucy Lui
Alia - Dakota Fanning
You guys are all nuts. The 1984 version of Dune sucked so unbelievably hard. I have read Dune literally dozens of times (and each sequel slightly less thereafter.) I recently finished a complete re-read of the entire original 6 + the KJA/BH 7, AND watched Dune on VHS.
I think people are mistaking "bad" for "nuanced"; I was trying to explain to my girlfriend, who has never read Dune but is by no means stupid, what is going on. It was completely impossible. The only thing that I could get across to her was that Paul was the semi-penultimate step in a breeding program that took thousands of years. And now he's on Desperate Housewives.
I work with a guy who was at Dune on opening night. They handed out vocabulary cards at the theater. That's not "deep and mysterious Sci-Fi", that's bad movie direction.
Dune'84 is a piece of shit. I never would have read the book had I seen the movie first because it was clearly directed by a raving lunatic. The only saving grace is that the Evil Guys were genuinely evil and brilliant actors. GG Sting.
Also, they threw away Duncan's first life without ever explaining why he was even important.
"KWIK, TO THE WEIRD FLYING THING!"
"Duncan dyed, LOL!"
Sci-Fi's version was much more watchable. Sci-Fi's Children of Dune was fantastic (in no small part thanks to Brian Tyler's soundtrack).
I'm not saying they have to explain everything in the movie, but Dune: Sting Edition lost all credibility with me when the Navigator first shows up. He reminds me too much of Mer-Man, Skeletor's fishy sidekick.
I was the president of the university UNIX User's Group in Harrisonburg (about 2 hours away) and we decided to go as a "field trip". For a bunch of UNIX nerds, let me tell you, the NSA Crypto Museum is a religious experience. It was probably the most excited some of us had been in years. The people there were *awesome*; you could tell they were genuinely happy to have a bunch of "kids" that were super-excited to be there. I had my picture taken with the working Enigma (replica?) they have on display. Using it, standing next to it, hugging it. A good friend of mine got his picture taken while "licking" the Cray. There was a older man in full uniform volunteering..he followed us around and laughed like crazy.
I have to imagine that a large number of people go there because it's "Something to do" or because one guy in the family read Cryptonomicon recently. When I told the guy we'd driven for 4 hours *just* for the Crypto Museum he got this look of wonder in his eye. It was a fantastic experience; take a group of friends that really like those sort of things because there's a *lot* of "boring stuff" if you don't. Mock-ups of Vietnam listening posts, a history of the Enigma cracking project...beautiful.
I like your theory : ) I've been in datacenters where there were "black" rooms and nobody could get in to. But a lot of non-government entities need that sort of thing. Banks and stock exchanges certainly like to have blackout rooms, and the government has them for non-spying-on-citizens stuff.
The problem was that even after RTFA'ing I didn't buy his creditability. I'm sure it happens. But there's a bunch of other explanations for it without having to unleash my Power of Paranoia...which I assure you is quite powerful ; )
Because you'd still have to reroute traffic to the routers that the fiber is connected to, and that takes precious milliseconds. And a lot of your traffic would mysteriously start going through NOCs that are totally unnecessary. Because there's no way they could do it to *every* POP at every Tier1 or 2 provider.
I'm not going to claim it's not happening, but this is not the guy to listen to. I don't want to be a dick about this, but he's not a network engineer, he's not a network admin, he's not a data specialist...he's a cable splicer. He does VDV work for AT&T. Is it possible, if not likely, that he maybe doesn't have a complete understanding of how all the tubes work past Layer 1? (And just to really be a dick about it, every VDV person I've met claims to be a data network expert because they lay the wires. Ask one why Ethernet is limited to 100M by spec and watch the fun.)
With only 20 of those facilities, and just in AT&T locations, the fibertaps wouldn't even have a significant percentage of traffic going through them. Do some traceroutes; do some ping tests; Try it from different providers. They would have to be routing all traffic through those points. Your ping times would know, and the global BGP tables would know.
I have a comfortable tinfoil hat. What I *could* be easily convinced of is that the NSA has taps on all oceanic fiber. That's much easier to do, since there's not all that many. And...frankly, they should be. We pay them a lot of money to keep us safe. A *lot* of money. But I don't think this is the guy to listen to regarding something this big and damning.
Which crap? That Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia would like to see the west fail as superpowers?
That they publicly or covertly sponsor terrorism from state coffers?
That their leaders (except the Saudis) explicitly state that a goal of their government is to destroy the United States?
That it takes more than one or two atomic weapons to kill thousands (if not millions) of people?
That the United States has the right, as any country, to defend themselves from attack...without first becoming a martyr?
That Iraq (pre-war) and Iran would probably not say "Oh..wow, you guys want stuff to make atomic weapons? Man...I really wish I could help, but I'm dealing with all this shit from Bill Clinton..."
That a significant portion of Americans are willing to believe that George Bush is the head of the largest conspiracy ever created on US soil, but that Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah are too stupid to buy active Antrax and Uranium?
That somewhere in Syria, Iraq, or Iran are there at least 10 scientists capable of engineering a nuclear reactor without help from the US or Russia? And that somewhere, perhaps in the same place, perhaps not, are 10 other scientists capable of building a delivery vessel?
The only part that I don't believe is that you were in the White House and the Defense Department while they were planning for the war; either you were, or you're entire opinion is based on what you've seen and read through laughably filtered sources...just like me.
If, however, you are a General that was in charge of planning and know, for a fact, that you only planned for two months, then I retract my statement. But in that case, I do blame you, entirely, for the situation we're in now.
Now is definitely *not* the time to attack Iran, and I certainly want to avoid it at all cost, but Iraq just happens to be a very nice long-term strategy for a staging ground, don't you think?
If you still don't buy it, I highly recommend Holy War, Inc -> http://www.amazon.com/Holy-War-Inc-Inside-Secret/dp/0743234952/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-5456481-7704168?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194530691&sr=8-1
I think the answer to this question is how much of other American's blood you're willing to spill before you can declare a war Rightous and Defensive. Some attacks have already occurred. They were perpetrated by by Islamic extremist *that were harbored by nations like Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. In some cases (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia), they country is officially an "ally". In other cases (Syria, Iran, Iraq), the country is run by a government -known to specifically desire the destruction of the United States-.
Didn't anyone ever tell you that the best defense is a good offense?
Iraq and Iran had/have clear, well-established goals; predominantly, the fall of the West as a superpower. That includes the US, Canada, and Europe. They don't have to make direct, military confrontation because 1) the leaders don't buy into most of Islam themselves and 2) they have a ready-made paramilitary group that the can fund semi-overtly.
If Iran or Syria managed to acquire nuclear weapons (this is pretty much a given at this point, considering the vast number of unaccounted nukes after the fall of the USSR) they have to figure out one, *exactly 1*, way to get a high-yield nuclear weapon into the United States. Either New York or LA is the most likely target; probably LA this time.
That is why Iraq was a threat. Iraq also had the weakest military and the strongest pro-American sentiment among the populace, with Iran as a close second. So you have a country with a minor threat (much less than Iran or Syria) BUT WITH POPULAR SUPPORT AND A VASTLY INFERIOR MILITARY. Who *do* you attack first?
Now, within 5 years we'll have a solid base of operations in Iraq to stage much less costly and more easily defended attacks into Iraq and Syria.
As far as WMDs, here, let me give you a thought exercise.
I live in Virginia. Somewhere in Virginia I have hidden a white 1987 Chevy 2500HD van. You know I have it; the UN knows I have it, the UN inspectors know I have it. I buy gas for it. I buy replacement parts for it, but *you have never seen the van*. I refuse to show you the van. If I can get this van to a major African, European, or Asian city, I can drive it wherever it needs to go. The van represents an unknown threat.
PS: Sorry, I lied....I can also move it anywhere in West Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, DC, or Tennessee; I know people there who have just as big of an interest in getting the Van to Europe as I do.
Find the van.
Oh...the van doesn't exist? You have looked at every square inch of Virginia? I lied to you about the van?
Well shit! Sorry...
PPS: It's actually a Red Ford Pickup.
I have a moral compunction against badmouthing somebody when they can't defend themselves. I also have a somewhat higher-than-normal access to the problem than other folks because I've done consulting work for this guy in the past. The consulting work is how I realized that he's an idiot; now every time I hear of Harrisonburg trying to do something retarded with computers, I can virtually *guarantee* that his name will appear as the first quote.
I have no problem naming him in the public paper, because I assume he can read. But I really doubt he actually knows how to use a computer, much less has heard of Slashdot. The odd thing was, I went to a CDW-G event a few weeks ago and all 7 IT mover's-n-shakers in HB were there. One mention of this guy's name had people laughing in the isles. He's a laughingstock of technology in this area, but 1) he works for the local university so you can't outright say he's an idiot and 2) he's old and knows lots of people.
Of course, this raises an interesting question...should anybody be developing technology solutions if they're unaware of slashdot?
I've been throwing around the idea of starting a push in my local paper to create an (unpaid) elected official to oversee Stupid IT Tricks in my bassakwards town. I would run for it. I think it would be fun : )
My fair city recently fell for this kind of scam. 802.11x is basically the absolute worst wireless spec to try and deploy over any area larger than a medium-sized house. Massive interference; everything from cordless phones to microwave ovens. Leaves destroy 90% of the signal. Leaves with fresh rain on them completely destroy even multipath.
Our city tried so that it could attract high-tech workers. They were gunning for a "revolutionary" wireless deployment using IP6 so they could do multicast groups with video. Over WiFi backhaul. F'ing brilliant. Even though Harrisonburg has some truly epic fails, in *this* case they did okay. They gave permission for a private company to do it, but refused to actually *pay* for them to do it. Naturally, the company failed.
The system was originally pitched as an offshoot of the electric company's fiber ring. The municipal wireless wasn't supposed to be about ubiquitous laptop and PDA internet. They were going to use Better Stuff (Motorola Canopy, or Navini, maybe) to create a city utility network. ISPs could sign up to provide internet and pay the city a fee per customer that signs up. In that way, fixed broadband last-mile backhauls *actually make sense*, though perhaps not financially.
Somehow, though, it turned into a "WiFi Cloud".
This is mostly due to one technology "adviser" from the local university that is a *complete* moron. I'm not sure how much money he makes off of recommending worthless technology ideas, but we'll just say that "Harrisonburg IP6 Wireless Network" was not his dumbest idea by a long shot.
Mod me funny! ; )
That's good, because I paid a hell of a lot of money for my copies of Office & Windows. They are not "cheap" by any regard, so that is eliminated from your (very accurate) list. We should be approaching "fast and good" at any release now...
+1. It was a complete non-story, but it does go to prove one great thing about America: any idiot with a [microphone|camera|keyboard] can be heard, parroted, and divert the entire country away from important things.
Seconded. Vtiger is an excellent system that's based on a fork of SugarCRM from a while back. I've been running it for about 8 months production and I've been extremely happy with it. You can make custom fields for time tracking and cheat a little bit to get asset management. Overall, B+/A-
We have roughly the same setup, except that we're a small outsourced IT company. After messing with craptastic CRM systems for about a year, I eventually settled on one called VTiger. It's easy to setup, very straightforward to use. Customizing is kind of a pain; it's written very well but it's a steep learning curve for the design. But it is PHP/MySQL, and we've been very happy with it.
The multipart crapfest that was Usenet of 2000 has been replaced with the absolute brilliance that is newzbin. http://v3.newzbin.com/
But I think they've stopped accepting users. I think Newzbin and Giganews Unlimited has done more to resurrect Usenet as a viable file transfer medium (read as: "theft engine") than anything since NNTP was designed. They pull $1 every 2 weeks and have a peer-edited review system. I even gank all my Linux isos from Giganews because they can sustain 550kps to my desktop. BT rarely, if ever, can pull that off.
This isn't true, though, especially for businesses. Even small businesses are using MS SBS (Small Business Server) which uses Exchange. Exchange needs Outlook to function as anything useable. OO has no Outlook replacement. *every single bit* of new code and work should be going into making an Outlook replacement that works *with Exchange*. Saying that OpenOffice can replace MS Office, at this time, is a complete lie, and not the direction we want to take this in.
For personal use, OO is pretty good, but it's still not ready for massive advertisement and downloads. Think of it this way: you have the option of downloading OpenOffice for Free, or Microsoft Office for Free. You install both..but which do you use? At the present (assuming I were in Windows) I would use Word.
This is nothing against the OO team. They do a tremendous job; but it's not *quite* at the point where I could unleash it on my mom (or, perhaps unleash my mom on it.)
I've been using VMWare Workstation and GSX (now just "Server") very successfully under Linux. I have two virtualized Linux and three virtualized 2003 Server instances on a 2x Opteron 240. It works wonderfully.
However, to be honest, on a laptop it likely makes more sense to run the host as WinXP. With Linux hosting and XP in Vmware, you don't get hardware graphics acceleration (perhaps in either OS.) Linux and laptops are still not there yet, so you may as well use XP as the host OS and get full hardware support.
Mine was a very generalized guideline as not to water down a political discussion with tech. In reality, we did a lot of per-user shaping, but it's of limited use. Assume you have a 10Mbit link @ 1,500 a month. If you're selling DSL @ 29.95 a month, you break even on the 50th subscriber. But if each DSL sold at 768k download, the industry standard when we were doing DSL, 14 users at max download speed saturate the entire link. You can't hard-throttle somebody at lower than what they paid for, that really *is* straight-out fraud. But you can use priority tables in such a way that P2P has many times less chance of getting through a network than a ping.
Ugh, my GRAMMAH on that was HORRIBLE. Never write a post when you're in a hurry :(
I've managed two ISPs, one a Dialup/DSL and the other a WISP in the last two years, and I can assure the /. crowd that bandwidth throttling is nothing new, and you're probably all already subjected to it anyway.
Pretty much any ISP that's ever had to face a legal problem has somewhere in their contract/TOS/AUP that the service is a "best effort", regardless of anything else you may have heard. It's kind of like the "NO WARANTEE WHATSOEVER" clause in the GPL; it's designed to keep ISPs from getting sued in the event that downtime causes a business to lose a contract or something similar.
Pretty much every ISP that's smaller than 10k people keeps an "Abusive User" list. ISPs sell bandwidth based on average usage multiplied by their bandwidth an oversubscription rate. When somebody is some amount over the average (say, 2 STDDEVs), they got throw in the "Abusive User" pile. The way we handled it was to set Abusers entire traffic pipe as one priority above "bulk".
Anything not classified as "Good" data (HTTP, SMTP, POP3/IMAP, etc) got assigned to "Bulk". Therefore, an Abusive's entire pipe had a lower priority then a normal sub's "Good" traffic.
In this case, our "best effort" was to provide a better service to the vast number of people who do *not* download 10 gigs of newsgroups a day. If the Abusive actually canceled there account, that's *great*, because we were losing money on them anyway and could now pack 20-30 Normals into the bandwidth they were previously using.
Also, if you check in your contract, most are worded so that the bandwidth cap is advertised as the "up to" speed. Basically, it means: "Due to how the Internet operates, we cannot garanutee you any maximum speed. We can, however, garantee you that it will never be over _______ Kbps, as that is the service you have purchased."
So the moral of the story is: If you download 20 gigs a day, your ISP would probably rather you leave anyway, because they're losing money on you.
What is it about the internet that makes people so damn lazy? Why should somebody else have to verify your made-up statistics? If you can't be bothered to find some crackpot webpage to back them up, don't bother making them up in the first place.
You don't to use hardly any of the commandline functions once you know how to use the shell client. 95% of people will only ever use mysqladmin and mysqldump. All the functionality they need is built into the mysql command shell. I think the real difference is that the mysql command shell (versus psql) seems closer to a natural language interface. I mean, "show databases" is pretty straightforward and intuitive. "show tables", too.
With normal PHP development all the "Advanced features" of either postgres or mysql are basically dropped by the wayside and ignored. You shouldn't rely on data types and integrity checks in the database for web applications; your form processing should have already checked all that or you're leaving your self open to SQL injection, XSS problems and really crappy error messages. Very few people even use joins!
Bottom line is that most people (like me) use mysql because it's fast and easy, and we really just want one step above flatfile. I have a lot of experience with Postgres, MSSQL, Oracle, and flatfile. I'll go to MySQL every time.
I've used one in the US at an installation, but I'm not sure exactly how much I can say about it. We were considering buying one and requested a demo of a live site by the company.
Navini has a couple dozen, maybe 100, maybe more installations in the states. They use an antenna array, proprietary and disturbingly expensive multi-antenna controller, and some patented version of orthoganal beam forming. They also only sell one unlicensed product in the 2.4 range. The rest are from 2.1-2.3, 2.6, and a 5.x that I don't recall.
In our real life tests on a live system, the portable USB/ethernet modem device was good for about 5-6 miles outdoors in a moving vehicle, and 2-3 miles if it was indoors. The entire backplane was 12MBps..which as anybody will tell you, under load, will barely qualify as "Broadband."
Additionally, a telco has deployed an older Navini system where I live. It..doesn't work so well inside. It *does* work, however, with a laptop and a modem about anywhere in town (their installation is on a *very* high peak).
Overall, we decided against the system because it just didn't perform that well. It would have been a multi-hundred-thousand dollar install, potentially, for a 12Mbit backplan to deliver rural-only broadband. Navini, though, has done amazing work and real-life data aside, the implementation is brilliantly conceived. It's not exactly WiMax. Since the WiMax 'standard' is still sort of....*shrug*...they can say about anyting they want. It's similar to the standard, and it does work in some limited fashion...but it's still wireless.
-Y