The real pain of password changes is the first few days of the transition while your finger muscle memory wants to use the old one and your brain isn't moving fast enough to stop them (or forgets to use the new one too.)
One way I have found that works for me is to stop what I'm doing for a minute, clear my head and then look around at my surroundings. The first thing my eyes stop on generally has some text on it (books, various pieces of computer hardware, memory cards, magazines...) - if the text meets the stringent password requirements (8+ characters mixed case with at least one number) I use it. Doesn't have to be a word, just a string of random characters - but just something that seeing it there in plain sight will remind you what it is. DellUltraSharp2001fp is 20 characters mixed case, not in the dictionary (yet, but thanks for adding it for me guys!) and is both invisible and right out there in plain view at the same time. 1000ftEquals300m is another for you, if you happen to wear a Rolex Submariner.
As for multiple passwords, just change them all to be the same thing when the next one needs changing. Just because your Windows environment forces 60 day changes and your Unix lets you ride for 90 days doesn't mean you can't change them all across the board every 60 days.
Cooling them down won't make them perform better or last longer
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one, at least on the 'last longer' part. It won't make them perform better, we agree on that - but I expect that running the drives 15 degrees C (27 degrees F) cooler (35C vs 50C) or (95F vs 122F) is going to make a profound difference on the long term lifespan of the drives.
What I don't understand is why he has 2 disk RAID-1 plus a hot standby. If a disk fails the RAID-1 is vulnerable until it can be rebuilt. Why not just use a three disk RAID-1 set?
Because that's not RAID-1, it's RAID-5. But yes, it's a valid configuration. The hassle or concern going with using all three disks as part of the RAID array without a hot spare is that he would need to tear the machine apart to replace a failed drive, and until he did so the machine would be limping along unprotected and vulnerable to another failure (which would destroy everything.) In his two disk set with a hot spare it would auto-failover to the spare drive, rebuild and be back in business (he could replace the dead drive at his convenience, a hot spare isn't required for his system to run full speed because he is still running RAID-1.)
Note that that's just the first Google hit I found for case fan exhaust twin bay 5.25 - the picture is what I am talking about, I don't know anything about the company.
All the hot air goes to the top of the case, this fan has twin horizontally mounted fans blowing air out the front of the case. It dropped the case temperature quite a bit, enough that my system went from 'generally unstable' to rock solid. The nice thing about it is that it uses ducted fans without obstructions, they seemed to be very effective in getting the air to go how I wanted it to go and not just swirling around.
Ahhh - I was talking typical travel within the US with at least one layover (ie, less than 2 hours total in the air.)
The other concerns I have are machine empathy - I can almost hear the laptop hard drive scream every time the machine is moved while running, and battery life (even the best laptops run maybe 3 hours on a normal workload.)
Neither can a set of toe-nail clippers, but see it they don't play 'how many fingers can I get up this guy's ass' with you for trying to sneak em on-board.
What do you have to gain, and what do you have to lose? Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?
The way I look at it, I'm generally not on the plane long enough to get anything done; at best the electronic toys are a nice distraction to pass the time. Read this month's Wired or LinuxWorld or whatever, get on the ground and get your groove back on.
You are right, but miss another important aspect : perception.
Once upon a time when the fastest desktops were 25MHz, a 486DX-25 would run WordPerfect 5.1 incredibly fast. Mind bendingly fast. Almost too fast, in that there were those looking for ways to share all that performance with multiple users. If you booted up a 486DX-25 today and ran WordPerfect 5.1 on it you would probably wonder how people got anything done on a machine so slow. The machine didn't change, but our perception of performance did.
Once upon a time a PIII 1GHz was considered mind bendingly fast, with response times and frame rates hitting numbers beyond your wildest imagination (at the time.) Install the same apps today and you would wonder how people could stand playing games at 27fps and waiting 37 seconds for Word to load if Excel was already running.
I'm agreeing with you that the software bloat is a contributing factor, but it isn't the only factor. Our daily interaction with faster machines raises our expectations, gradually, to the point where we feel we need faster hardware. That said, there is no way I'm dropping $4k on a new box just because it has a dual core chip in it.
I am also an avid Linux user (SuSE 9.0 Server, SuSE 9.1 Pro, 9.2 Pro, RedHat 8.0, 9.0 Desktop - all on different machines) so... pray tell, how do I go about making better use of my hardware to rip DVDs?
Perhaps using Linux?
Go on, what.RPM package will let me rip a DVD while running compression algorithms on a previously ripped file-set to convert it from DVD to.avi and still have a responsive system so I can surf the web on FireFox at the same time - all on a single instance of an operating system, on a single core CPU while we are at it?
Quite honestly I would like to know, because you seem to be an authority, and because I have enough distros running on different machines to implement whatever you recommend.
It is responsiveness of the system, and scalability of tasks. Granted, a SMP box doesn't run any faster than a single CPU machine, but run two tasks in parallel and that's where the difference happens.
Honestly I could care less about comparing this to single CPU machines (because HyperThreading already solves that issue) - the real difference I am interested in is comparing the performance of identical setups, one with a HyperThreaded CPU and the other with one of these new dual core chips.
Ripping a CD isn't overly taxing, but on my home system I often run two concurrent Windows 2000 Pro virtual machines on a Windows XP host (see also : VMware) and have one instance decrypting the files off of a DVD onto the hard drive, while the other instance compressing 4G~8G of data in DVD format down to 700M of.avi format.
That is CPU intensive. Not sure the system would even be responsive enough to open a browser if it didn't have HyperThreading.
Good reasons for fixed width fonts: Formatting text that is sent to the console (I program a bit in the Unix environment.) Making the code header (documentation) neater ASCII Pong, ASCII art Comparing similar, yet different lines of code (particularly if the front of the line of code is different, but parts of it are the same.) Using the editor as a cheapo word processor. Consistent formatting on different machines (some applications give tab characters different widths.) And most importantly : OCR'able print-outs of the source. Don't laugh, it happens.
As for keeping the string length under a certain size: Console output (80 chars on some Unix terms). Fixed record sizes (ie, faking data in or out of a database) Not having the code wrap on my printout, because I use a code formatter that draws lines between all the loops and having a line wrap destroys the illusion.
Well, that or you could take the guy that did it, chop off his right hand and his left foot, burn one of his eyes right out of his skull, then promote him to line manager.
I pretty much guarantee that the IP theft problem will go away.
(If not, give him a peg, a hook, an eye patch and a parrot and he can be the company pirate mascot.)
I would imagine it's not the code, it's the data. Who cares about a hundred thousand lines of poorly written code when they could walk out with the personal and financial information for 50,000 customers of Dell, IBM, Sears or Citibank. A single 1G USB drive will let someone steal the identities of a zillion people, as was recently reported here on/. - for some of that highly profitable identity theft we keep hearing about.
Proportional fonts make it difficult to eye-ball character columns, particularly if you are want to keep string lengths under a certain length.
With fixed space fonts you can put one of these ://345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 123456789012345678901234567890 for an 80 character wide ruler, cut it and paste it as necessary into your code and Voila! instant width chart (make it whatever size you want.)
I have also found that my head OCR's faster with certain fonts (Courier 10 point, San Serif 10 or 12 point) than in all the fruity variable width fonts.
It has to do with campaign contribution laws, if I had to guess. An individual is limited to how much $$$ he can contribute to a particular candidate. If it costs $5,000 a year to run your blog and you spend every day raving about how great a particular candidate is... have you, in effect, contributed $5,000 to his campaign?
I think $2,000 is one of the magic limits, but I'm not entirely sure how that works.
Having been aligned with the 'infrastructure' tech group at one company and with the 'consulting' wing with another company - I want to agree heartily with your main point. There are two ways a 'tech' can contribute to a company : be in the 'expense' group, or be in the 'income' group. The 'income' group is treated better, with more respect, most of the time.
The 'expense' part is important, no doubt (and when I was a member of this group I overestimated my importance as I am sure every other sys/admin, network tech, and DBA does) but the cash flows in one direction only (out) so the only way the company can directly impact the bottom line (with respect to the infrastructure team) is to cut costs, pay, bonuses, and budgets for new toys.
The 'income' part of the group is treated a little different because additional money 'invested' in this group can pay a return on investment greater than 100%. If I am billable at $160 an hour (it has been a while since that was true) the company can justify treating me 'better' - new laptop with 2G of memory, stay in a better hotel while I'm off-site, rent a car I enjoy driving, come back a day later so I can spend Saturday at Disneyland (all of these are real examples.) Keep your billable people happy, they do better work, the customer gets a better product (off-site consulting in my example.)
Leverage and extend your insight, your last sentence. Understand where to direct your focus (it may mean changing companies) in order to be a part of the 'income' group and capitalize on the work environment afforded that group. You can't change the way the world works - but you can change the way you work in that world.
As for minorities and women - individuals have shown that the generalities are false at the individual level, while true at a general level. As each minority and woman, uniquely, is an individual, the generality doesn't have to apply to them unless they give up that individuality and become a member of the general class - and everybody knows how lazy, undedicated, or whatever (insert your favorite generality here) are.
Yes - although Windows 2003 Server Enterprise has a maximum of 32 GB for x86-based PCs.
I have yet to fill the Dell 400sc servers I have with memory (most have 4x512M = 2G, but they can hold 4x1G = 4G) basically for lack of cash or actual need - so I really couldn't utilize it fully if I had it (or if I had the new 64-bit one either.) Good to know, though, if you wanted to get more than 4G into a single box but weren't ready to go fully 64-bit just yet.
Is that anything like one guy shouting out 'Marco' and the fork lift driver shouting 'Polo!' ?
Re:Is there a list of softare ready for it?
on
Windows XP X64 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You can throw 2-3G of memory at 32-bit applications right now using regular XP Professional or 32-bit Windows 2003 Server. With the new 64-bit version of Windows 2003 Server Enterprise you can throw a full TeraByte of physical memory at a single application. Good luck getting that much physical memory in a box right now, but you can get 32G or maybe 64G in a single machine right now if you try real hard (and have a LOT of cash.)
Something tells me Duke Nukem Forever will take full advantage of the 64-bit platform.
I suppose that we should tell women, blacks and people in other marginalized groups as well that the key to transcending problems such as unequal employment opportunities is "competence and confidence."
Oprah and Colin Powell both say yes. So does Michael Powell (the HNIC at the FCC.) Michael Jordan and Shaq are also doing pretty good on little more than 'competence and confidence.' Carly Fiorina was worthless as fuck-all but she convinced others of her 'competence and confidence' and made about 1/8th of a billion dollars over 3 years in the process.
Women and blacks can do just fine, if they are excellent performers with excellent skills, manners, morals, values, vocabulary, discipline, and ability.
Slashdot Mirror
The real pain of password changes is the first few days of the transition while your finger muscle memory wants to use the old one and your brain isn't moving fast enough to stop them (or forgets to use the new one too.)
...) - if the text meets the stringent password requirements (8+ characters mixed case with at least one number) I use it. Doesn't have to be a word, just a string of random characters - but just something that seeing it there in plain sight will remind you what it is. DellUltraSharp2001fp is 20 characters mixed case, not in the dictionary (yet, but thanks for adding it for me guys!) and is both invisible and right out there in plain view at the same time. 1000ftEquals300m is another for you, if you happen to wear a Rolex Submariner.
One way I have found that works for me is to stop what I'm doing for a minute, clear my head and then look around at my surroundings. The first thing my eyes stop on generally has some text on it (books, various pieces of computer hardware, memory cards, magazines
As for multiple passwords, just change them all to be the same thing when the next one needs changing. Just because your Windows environment forces 60 day changes and your Unix lets you ride for 90 days doesn't mean you can't change them all across the board every 60 days.
Cooling them down won't make them perform better or last longer
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one, at least on the 'last longer' part.
It won't make them perform better, we agree on that - but I expect that running the drives 15 degrees C (27 degrees F) cooler (35C vs 50C) or (95F vs 122F) is going to make a profound difference on the long term lifespan of the drives.
What I don't understand is why he has 2 disk RAID-1 plus a hot standby. If a disk fails the RAID-1 is vulnerable until it can be rebuilt. Why not just use a three disk RAID-1 set?
Because that's not RAID-1, it's RAID-5.
But yes, it's a valid configuration. The hassle or concern going with using all three disks as part of the RAID array without a hot spare is that he would need to tear the machine apart to replace a failed drive, and until he did so the machine would be limping along unprotected and vulnerable to another failure (which would destroy everything.)
In his two disk set with a hot spare it would auto-failover to the spare drive, rebuild and be back in business (he could replace the dead drive at his convenience, a hot spare isn't required for his system to run full speed because he is still running RAID-1.)
Here's what I did when facing a similar situation : get the heat out of the case.
Bay Fan
Note that that's just the first Google hit I found for case fan exhaust twin bay 5.25 - the picture is what I am talking about, I don't know anything about the company.
All the hot air goes to the top of the case, this fan has twin horizontally mounted fans blowing air out the front of the case. It dropped the case temperature quite a bit, enough that my system went from 'generally unstable' to rock solid. The nice thing about it is that it uses ducted fans without obstructions, they seemed to be very effective in getting the air to go how I wanted it to go and not just swirling around.
Ahhh - I was talking typical travel within the US with at least one layover (ie, less than 2 hours total in the air.)
The other concerns I have are machine empathy - I can almost hear the laptop hard drive scream every time the machine is moved while running, and battery life (even the best laptops run maybe 3 hours on a normal workload.)
...simply won't take down an airplane.
Neither can a set of toe-nail clippers, but see it they don't play 'how many fingers can I get up this guy's ass' with you for trying to sneak em on-board.
What do you have to gain, and what do you have to lose?
Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?
The way I look at it, I'm generally not on the plane long enough to get anything done; at best the electronic toys are a nice distraction to pass the time. Read this month's Wired or LinuxWorld or whatever, get on the ground and get your groove back on.
It wasn't from chewing gum.
It was from the inside of a music cd cover.
One of your friends was fucking with you.
Don't ask how I know this.
You are right, but miss another important aspect : perception.
Once upon a time when the fastest desktops were 25MHz, a 486DX-25 would run WordPerfect 5.1 incredibly fast. Mind bendingly fast. Almost too fast, in that there were those looking for ways to share all that performance with multiple users. If you booted up a 486DX-25 today and ran WordPerfect 5.1 on it you would probably wonder how people got anything done on a machine so slow. The machine didn't change, but our perception of performance did.
Once upon a time a PIII 1GHz was considered mind bendingly fast, with response times and frame rates hitting numbers beyond your wildest imagination (at the time.) Install the same apps today and you would wonder how people could stand playing games at 27fps and waiting 37 seconds for Word to load if Excel was already running.
I'm agreeing with you that the software bloat is a contributing factor, but it isn't the only factor. Our daily interaction with faster machines raises our expectations, gradually, to the point where we feel we need faster hardware. That said, there is no way I'm dropping $4k on a new box just because it has a dual core chip in it.
I am also an avid Linux user (SuSE 9.0 Server, SuSE 9.1 Pro, 9.2 Pro, RedHat 8.0, 9.0 Desktop - all on different machines) so ... pray tell, how do I go about making better use of my hardware to rip DVDs?
.RPM package will let me rip a DVD while running compression algorithms on a previously ripped file-set to convert it from DVD to .avi and still have a responsive system so I can surf the web on FireFox at the same time - all on a single instance of an operating system, on a single core CPU while we are at it?
Perhaps using Linux?
Go on, what
Quite honestly I would like to know, because you seem to be an authority, and because I have enough distros running on different machines to implement whatever you recommend.
It is responsiveness of the system, and scalability of tasks.
Granted, a SMP box doesn't run any faster than a single CPU machine, but run two tasks in parallel and that's where the difference happens.
Honestly I could care less about comparing this to single CPU machines (because HyperThreading already solves that issue) - the real difference I am interested in is comparing the performance of identical setups, one with a HyperThreaded CPU and the other with one of these new dual core chips.
Ripping a CD isn't overly taxing, but on my home system I often run two concurrent Windows 2000 Pro virtual machines on a Windows XP host (see also : VMware) and have one instance decrypting the files off of a DVD onto the hard drive, while the other instance compressing 4G~8G of data in DVD format down to 700M of .avi format.
That is CPU intensive.
Not sure the system would even be responsive enough to open a browser if it didn't have HyperThreading.
Good reasons for fixed width fonts :
Formatting text that is sent to the console (I program a bit in the Unix environment.)
Making the code header (documentation) neater
ASCII Pong, ASCII art
Comparing similar, yet different lines of code (particularly if the front of the line of code is different, but parts of it are the same.)
Using the editor as a cheapo word processor.
Consistent formatting on different machines (some applications give tab characters different widths.)
And most importantly : OCR'able print-outs of the source. Don't laugh, it happens.
As for keeping the string length under a certain size:
Console output (80 chars on some Unix terms).
Fixed record sizes (ie, faking data in or out of a database)
Not having the code wrap on my printout, because I use a code formatter that draws lines between all the loops and having a line wrap destroys the illusion.
Well, that or you could take the guy that did it, chop off his right hand and his left foot, burn one of his eyes right out of his skull, then promote him to line manager.
I pretty much guarantee that the IP theft problem will go away.
(If not, give him a peg, a hook, an eye patch and a parrot and he can be the company pirate mascot.)
Yea, that would pretty much protect the data and code from being GMail / Hotmail / XYZ-Random-WebMail'ed out.
I would imagine it's not the code, it's the data. /. - for some of that highly profitable identity theft we keep hearing about.
Who cares about a hundred thousand lines of poorly written code when they could walk out with the personal and financial information for 50,000 customers of Dell, IBM, Sears or Citibank. A single 1G USB drive will let someone steal the identities of a zillion people, as was recently reported here on
Proportional fonts make it difficult to eye-ball character columns, particularly if you are want to keep string lengths under a certain length.
//345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 123456789012345678901234567890
With fixed space fonts you can put one of these :
for an 80 character wide ruler, cut it and paste it as necessary into your code and Voila! instant width chart (make it whatever size you want.)
I have also found that my head OCR's faster with certain fonts (Courier 10 point, San Serif 10 or 12 point) than in all the fruity variable width fonts.
That said, I have grown to like Verdana too.
It has to do with campaign contribution laws, if I had to guess. An individual is limited to how much $$$ he can contribute to a particular candidate. If it costs $5,000 a year to run your blog and you spend every day raving about how great a particular candidate is ... have you, in effect, contributed $5,000 to his campaign?
I think $2,000 is one of the magic limits, but I'm not entirely sure how that works.
Having been aligned with the 'infrastructure' tech group at one company and with the 'consulting' wing with another company - I want to agree heartily with your main point.
There are two ways a 'tech' can contribute to a company : be in the 'expense' group, or be in the 'income' group. The 'income' group is treated better, with more respect, most of the time.
The 'expense' part is important, no doubt (and when I was a member of this group I overestimated my importance as I am sure every other sys/admin, network tech, and DBA does) but the cash flows in one direction only (out) so the only way the company can directly impact the bottom line (with respect to the infrastructure team) is to cut costs, pay, bonuses, and budgets for new toys.
The 'income' part of the group is treated a little different because additional money 'invested' in this group can pay a return on investment greater than 100%. If I am billable at $160 an hour (it has been a while since that was true) the company can justify treating me 'better' - new laptop with 2G of memory, stay in a better hotel while I'm off-site, rent a car I enjoy driving, come back a day later so I can spend Saturday at Disneyland (all of these are real examples.) Keep your billable people happy, they do better work, the customer gets a better product (off-site consulting in my example.)
Leverage and extend your insight, your last sentence. Understand where to direct your focus (it may mean changing companies) in order to be a part of the 'income' group and capitalize on the work environment afforded that group. You can't change the way the world works - but you can change the way you work in that world.
As for minorities and women - individuals have shown that the generalities are false at the individual level, while true at a general level. As each minority and woman, uniquely, is an individual, the generality doesn't have to apply to them unless they give up that individuality and become a member of the general class - and everybody knows how lazy, undedicated, or whatever (insert your favorite generality here) are.
0-60 in 6.9 seconds isn't a sprint.
0=60 in 3.1 seconds is a sprint. And I get about 38 miles to the gallon.
GSX-1100R - and it sucks when the weather is bad.
Yes - although Windows 2003 Server Enterprise has a maximum of 32 GB for x86-based PCs.
I have yet to fill the Dell 400sc servers I have with memory (most have 4x512M = 2G, but they can hold 4x1G = 4G) basically for lack of cash or actual need - so I really couldn't utilize it fully if I had it (or if I had the new 64-bit one either.) Good to know, though, if you wanted to get more than 4G into a single box but weren't ready to go fully 64-bit just yet.
Look into the technology used by the NHL on Fox for making the hockey puck more visible to the home viewers.
Here is an oversimplified diagram, but enough to get you pointed in the right direction.
Is that anything like one guy shouting out 'Marco' and the fork lift driver shouting 'Polo!' ?
You can throw 2-3G of memory at 32-bit applications right now using regular XP Professional or 32-bit Windows 2003 Server. With the new 64-bit version of Windows 2003 Server Enterprise you can throw a full TeraByte of physical memory at a single application. Good luck getting that much physical memory in a box right now, but you can get 32G or maybe 64G in a single machine right now if you try real hard (and have a LOT of cash.)
Something tells me Duke Nukem Forever will take full advantage of the 64-bit platform.
Actually the response was 'OMFG u AWP C4mp3r wH0r3!!!'
I suppose that we should tell women, blacks and people in other marginalized groups as well that the key to transcending problems such as unequal employment opportunities is "competence and confidence."
Oprah and Colin Powell both say yes.
So does Michael Powell (the HNIC at the FCC.)
Michael Jordan and Shaq are also doing pretty good on little more than 'competence and confidence.'
Carly Fiorina was worthless as fuck-all but she convinced others of her 'competence and confidence' and made about 1/8th of a billion dollars over 3 years in the process.
Women and blacks can do just fine, if they are excellent performers with excellent skills, manners, morals, values, vocabulary, discipline, and ability.