An Israeli company in charge of US law enforcement wiretapping got caught selling wiretap info to drug dealers in LA. The FBI was also worried that Federal wiretap information was being supplied to the Mossad.
Israel has figured out that the best way to spy on everybody else is to be the country making all the security hardware and software. Brilliant.
It would behoove all companies to do due diligence as to exactly what connections the companies running their security hardware and software have to government agencies - either through the employment histories of the company officers or through government funding sources as is the case with many Israeli companies. Industrial espionage is a state-sponsored activity in many countries.
I wouldn't touch CheckPoint with a ten foot pole after this.
with one of my own DOC files. It opened it and displayed it properly. Fair enough, although it wasn't a terribly complicated document - a one page affair with some bold, centering, etc.
However, if you look at the available menu, this thing doesn't even come close to Microsoft Word functionality. You can adjust the fonts, alignment, etc., basic stuff like that, and apparently insert a table (I didn't test that), but the rest of Word's functionality simply doesn't exist.
Nice try, Mike. Come back in a year when you've got something that really does the job.
Why do people try to convince people that some product does things it doesn't even come close to doing? Do they assume everyone is simply deaf, dumb and blind?
Probably SAIC - the CIA front company the Bush crime family uses for a lot of shady stuff.
In any event, whatever company it was, look for the names Bush the Elder, James Baker, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al, on the board of directors either present or past.
That or the company is owned by the Carlyle Group.
Or it's an Israeli company. We gave an Israeli company the contracts to run our law enforcement wire tapping operation - until employees got caught selling wiretap data to drug dealers in LA. The same company also offers mass transit video surveillance systems - like the one in the London Underground that got bombed.
Israel has figured out that the best way to spy on the world is to make the security gadgets the world depends on. That's why you have tons of Israeli security and technology companies like Checkpoint firewall. Now that I know that, rely on a Checkpoint firewall? I don't think so.
If they enhance IE 7 to prevent ANY ActiveX control from working by default, it will damage the usability of the idiot Web sites that use that crap. Therefore we can KNOW that despite their claims for IE7 being enhanced to prevent writing anywhere except to temporary files, ActiveX will still be turned on by default.
Worse, there is nothing preventing IE7 from writing spyware to a temporary file, and then the spyware writing itself anywhere it wants (subject to whatever user account controls MS is also implementing.) Only by locking down the system so that NOTHING but the OS runs without first being given permission at least once can spyware be prevented - and that only if the end user understands what programs are spyware and what aren't. A lot of spyware is disguised as pointless but cute programs offering some minor functionality.
Also, a LOT of spyware today virtually takes over the OS - making the files invisible, hard to find and almost impossible to remove without System privilege, let alone Administrator privilege.
I doubt very much that Microsoft's little enhancement of end user privileges and restrictive sandboxing is going to slow down spyware one jot. There are too many hackers making money producing these things to let some MS monkeys figure out how to beat them.
This phrase needs to be struck from the propaganda rolls.
Or better, re-applied to anything coming out of the White House since the US has murdered more children over the last twenty years than just about anybody, counting the Iraq sanctions and the Iraq invasion.
I wonder why I'm running Mandriva 2006 with absolutely no problems (except the incredibly stupid menu editor, of course, which everyone acknowledges is braindead.)
Everything on my machine (your standard clone) worked out of the box. I think the DSL setup wasn't as nice as Knoppix, but then nobody else's is any better that I'm aware of.
So they fired the guy who created the company. Big deal. Happens every day. I have yet to see anybody demonstrate that this means anything about where the distro is going or how easy future versions will be to use or anything else of significance. When it happens, call me.
And if it does go bad, well, there's plenty of other distros to try. Everybody is touting Ubuntu/Kubuntu. So far I've seen no reason to switch absent some major failing of Mandriva that might crop up. It's not hard for a distro to piss me off, though, so maybe it will happen here, too.
I just read a review of Fedora Core where it's clear those idiots STILL haven't figured out how to do decent package management - now, instead of the perfectly usable KPackage from back in 7.3 days, they've got TWO package managers installed, NEITHER of which show you the dependencies or where the files are installed.
Morons.
So why am I bothering to comment on this at all? Good question...
Reread the article - look at the amount of data they were backing up. Figure out how many tapes they needed to use every day to do that - then figure the odds if even a couple percent of them fail periodically.
And you verify your data nightly and still had a failure - even after cleaning the drive every two weeks. What more do you need to know? When's the last time you "cleaned a disk?"
When's the last time you did a disk check and then had a failure to read a sector? Most disks today don't even report bad sectors - they map them out - until the disk is near failing.
Tape is history for anything but archival and last-ditch disaster recovery.
The problem is trying to compare the cost of a removable container to the VALUE of the DATA and the risk factor of losing that data. There simply is no comparison. The cost of the hardware is minimal compared to the data value.
However, I will agree that a removable container WILL increase the risk, possibly comparable to the level of tape (a removable media). That is why backup over the network is better. I agree that many smaller companies might not be able to afford this.
However, smaller companies also don't have the volume necessary to justify large tape backup systems either. A smaller company can get probably get by with archival/disaster recovery backup to a removable disk - or even DVD backup if the backups are incremental instead of differential. Using incremental backups is not an issue if the backups are archival rather than recovery. So in the end a large company can afford network backup and can use that to avoid the issues of removable media, where a smaller company can afford removable media and use that to avoid the expense of a network backup.
Besides, as I pointed out, there is also a difference between archival backup and "disaster recovery" backup. Tape is adequate for archival because while it is possible the data may need to be restored, the company's operations are not at risk if it isn't (other than legal risk if the data is needed for legal reasons). Tape is also adequate for disaster recovery because under the conditions of a disaster, quick recovery is not required.
Operational recovery, as you correctly point out, is perfectly suited to disk backup.
I fully agree that there are a number of backup issues and they all have to be addressed with the procedures and technology suitable for each issue.
"People's lives will be affected by how well this works," Weiss says. "We are also saving brain cells," he adds. "This is a technology that we do not need to think about. It simply does its job. The stress of not knowing whether backups/restores will work is gone. Our backup failure rate has gone from more than 30% to absolute zero, and we have not had a backup/restore failure since installation."
Tape has fewer points of failure than a hard drive?
Oh, please...
Explain to me why the entire industry is moving to disk-to-disk recovery backup with tape relegated to archival backup.
Explain to me why most data is kept on hard drives for day to day use if they are so failure prone.
Optimum backup requires disk-to-disk for quick and absolutely reliable recovery. For security, disk-to-disk over the network to an offsite location allows for fully automated reliable offsite backup, but it is expensive in bandwidth even if you only transmit deltas. For offsite storage where netword bandwidth is not available or too expensive, for long-term archival storage, tape is useful - provided the tapes are maintained properly, stored properly and not overused.
Modern tape systems can be very fast and very large, and can cost less than equivalent capacity disk drives, but the fact of the matter is that industry studies show more problems with tape backups than with disk backups. Between equipment failure and operator error, tape backup is problematical for recovery purposes.
Just had a client who was installing his Mac and wanted me to hook him up to the Internet.
First thing he asked was, what did he need to be secure from the viruses?
I told him there ARE NO VIRUSES for Mac OSX. And damn little spyware - so little that no one has written an open source anti-spyware tool for the Mac, although there are one or two commercial products probably not worth buying.
I pointed him to ClamXav anyway, but told him that was just for protecting him from forwarding an email infected from a Windows machine to another Windows machine.
This may be a wakeup call for software quality assurance.
I mean, this indicates that McAfee simply IS NOT testing its updates on real live machines with a variety of software. I mean, delete MICROSOFT OFFICE FILES? C'mon, that PROVES these idiots aren't testing anything.
Well, okay, that's an overstatement - maybe. MOST of humanity needs exterminating, not all. That better?
Nonetheless, Bill Joy just doesn't get it. His Wired article was bullshit.
Freitas at least has some clue. I don't agree with ANY "total bans" on any sort of research, however. If you don't research it, you don't know where the dangers might actually be. And that will cost you in the long run more than taking a certain amount of risk. The notion that somebody is going to create an actual "grey goo" sufficient to do a significant amount of damage to anybody is highly speculative at best. Using this to justify a "total ban" on artificial life research in non-biological contexts is simply too extreme a position.
Most of these people are trying to make a name for themselves in nanotech by digging up "issues" they can exploit. Fine, no problem. Just don't take these "issues" seriously as it's entirely speculative at this point. It's on a par with worrying about AI taking over the world - back in 1965.
Besides, as I indicated, who says that's a bad outcome?
Well, speaking about focus stealing, what really annoys me about the File Save dialog in Mandriva Linux, when I'm saving a Web page from Firefox, is when the list of files comes up in the directory I want to save the new page in, the focus is on the list of files, NOT in the file name text box where I want to name the new file. The name of the Web page is in the box and highlighted for deletion, but when I start typing the new file name, the focus is in the file list and moves the highlight there to the file closest to what I'm typing.
This is completely inane. It might be correct for a file OPEN dialog, but it's wrong for a file SAVE dialog.
Also, I have to click to open the "Browse for Other Folders" section of the dialog if I want to change what file type the file is saved as. This should be open all the time to avoid that unncessary mouse click. I changed it to save a Web page as a text file when that was appropriate, then forgot to open it as I saved other Web pages for which that file type was not appropriate. Had the dialog been open, I might have noticed I was saving file with the wrong file type.
There's also no way to delete files and directories from the file save dialog, which I miss from Windows. If I've incorrectly saved a file and now want to get rid of that file and resave it with the correct file name, I have to go to Kongueror to delete the file either before or after saving it with the correct file name. Being able to delete from the file save or file open dialogs is much more efficient.
All in all, the file save/open dialog is adequate, but needs to be tweaked to be better - and not just to look like Windows, but to have the same functionality - functionality that is needed.
But you're absolutely correct about the Registry. I don't know how many times I've seen Windows hose itself with no way to determine what it did, because some Registry key got changed, necessitating a reinstall to correct the problem. Even Microsoft acknowledges this because they provide various tools to repair the Registry keys, especially when the IP stack is damaged by a bad uninstall of some antivirus or commo software. I had one client where I simply uninstalled a not-wanted McAfee AV program, and the Windows XP system would no longer communicate with a Linksys router. Dell required the OS be reinstalled from the recovery partition - problem solved. Unless one is an expert in every single one of the fifty thousand or more keys in a Windows XP Registry, as well as the thousands of keys installed by every one of the proprietary programs on the system, it is utterly impossible to debug many Windows problems via the Registry in many cases.
Don't even mention the Windows Server editions! I've had labs in college courses on Windows Server fail to function with absolutely no clue why - even the teacher was unable to determine the cause of the problem and even when a student next to me was able to make it work following the exact same steps. It's like Windows sometimes RANDOMLY updates and corrupts the Registry!
One reason Linux is so stable is because its text config files don't get updated by every Tom, Dick and Harry program running. They're updated once by the user - either directly or by a GUI front-end, and after that they're untouched. And if they are screwed up, you can SEE it and figure out how to fix it. The Registry? Good luck with that!
I mean, both sides are as usual exaggerating the value of their positions.
What matters is functionality and usability. If Linux can match Windows in functionality, and if Linux is easily usable, it doesn't matter whether the technigues used are the same as Windows.
It only matters from the viewpoint of those people who wish to lure Windows users into using Linux. While it is true that most people, as one of my instructors likes to say, "use computers because they have to, not because they want to", this doesn't need to have any significant effect on Linux adoption, provided that the functionality and usability are there. Re-training is not that big a hassle IF properly done.
Most corporations are not going to switch to Linux just for improvements in usability or even functionality. They are going to switch for other reasons: cost, security, flexibility, lack of vendor lock-in. They will only switch for functionality if that functionality is mission-critical. Once the decision is made, people will either be re-trained or required to learn the new systems themselves.
Comparing vi and Microsoft Word on keystrokes is abysmally stupid. Vi is an overly complicated mess of un-usability. The learning curve is so ridiculous that nobody but a geek would even try to use it. The same applies to Emacs. Neither of them is intended to be a word processor, which is by definition designed for end users, not geeks. Even if Word needs more keystrokes than vi to do a particular task, this says nothing about why those keystrokes were chosen. While I wouldn't doubt that Microsoft designers are less capable of designing efficient keystrokes than Linux designers, just comparing the keystrokes doesn't tell you why it was designed that way. There may have been good reasons for using those particular keystrokes. My point is that comparing two totally difference systems - even if the function being compared is identical - based on keystrokes is utterly irrelevant to the usability issue, and by definition irrelevant to the functionality issue.
There was recently an article elsewhere about how GIMP wasn't as good as PhotoShop. As usual, everyone said it didn't need to be as the GIMP developers didn't care about that, and further, that no one had the right to ask that GIMP be equal in usability to PhotoShop as that was abrogating the rights of the GIMP developers to go their own way.
This is incorrect reasoning. The issue is whether GIMP is intended to be the best graphics program in terms of functionality and usability. The second - and different - issue is whether it can be recommended to Windows users as a replacement for PhotoShop in order to lure Windows users to Linux. The two questions are entirely different. If the GIMP has functionality and usability problems - and it does either when COMPARED to PhotoShop or in some cases on its own merits - then it should be changed to solve those problems . Whether the GUI is changed to look like PhotoShop or not is not relevant EXCEPT to those people on Windows who don't want to learn a new GUI. THAT is not the GIMP developers problem, clearly. But if the GIMP developers do not INTEND to develop GIMP to the same level of usability and functionality, they should say so, and people should then stop recommending the GIMP as a replacement for PhotoShop.
It does OSS no good to recommend OSS products that do not adequately replace their Windows counterparts. It's okay to recommend OSS products that are less functional for those people who do not NEED that extra functionality. It is not okay to recommend OSS products for those people who DO need that extra functionality. Saying that GIMP is a replacement for PhotoShop without specifying the limits on functionality and usability is not helping OSS because when the faults are experienced, the new user will feel cheated. Any recommendation of OSS software to users of other software should acknowledge any significant differences in usability or functionality. That is, if the product doesn't do a certain thing, say s
Uhm, that may be true in certain cases, but it's not hard to get people in the military to fight against someone OTHER than their own families - like everybody else's families.
After, the military is used in most countries to repress its own citizens.
Consider that 55 million people voted for Bush's policies. It wouldn't be hard to get a bunch of them to join a Gestapo or the military to suppress the rest. Just read the posts here and elsewhere sometime. Most of these morons are wannabe fascists.
The entire issue boils down to: can you get at least five percent of the population ready to either take up arms against the government or support those who do?
In this country - no way, Jose.
But you could easily get five percent to become Gestapo here.
You're forgetting Iraq, which is doing very well indeed using former soldiers to train civilian insurgents.
Tanks, nukes, jets and the like don't work so well with their pilots shot in the head. Watch the Iraqi sniper video some time, or any of the IED videos out of Iraq.
The same would happen in the US - IF the US had any citizens with balls, which it doesn't.
Some months back I finally decided to upgrade my 1.5Mbps service to the 3Mbps. They had no problem letting me do that and charging me $20 less per month than I had been paying.
Then I noticed I wasn't getting 3Mbps - I was only getting about 10% more speed than I had been getting before. I didn't mind too much since it was still costing me $20 less than it had. But finally I decided to find out why.
After SBC tech support referred me to ASI, their provisioner, it turns out I'm 12,000 feet away from the CO DSLAM. The tech said 3Mbps service was only for people at 10,000 feet or less. Not only that, if they raised me nearer to 3, my line would start experiencing drops more and more frequently until the line went down and stayed down. They set me back to 1.5Mbps. I had to renegotiate my cost with the Sales department which decided I should pay $26.95 a month for six months, after which it would go up to $30-something.
I see a class action lawsuit coming up here, as SBC sells 3Mbps upgrades to people who THEY KNOW can't handle the speed and THEY KNOW will damage their service and make it unreliable.
Not only that, but they're promising TWENTY Mbps service this year. How is any subscriber going to get that speed - by being twenty feet from the CO - when they can't even deliver 3Mbps?
If it doesn't make Bill any money...it ain't happening.
And paying other people more than they're getting now doesn't make him any money - in his opinion, at least.
The Microsoft employees should form a charitable foundation and let Bill "donate" his stock to it. Then he'd go for it since he could use it as a PR and stock laundering and corporate investment scheme like he does his own foundation. The employees could be paid out of the income of the foundation like the charities get their money.
Now, if only John Hughes, the manager of my favorite band, The Corrs, would get over his Net phobia about downloads and get with the program.
Their Web site is inadequate, they don't stream video, they don't record video of their concerts, they're seriously fucking up. I could probably get them another million album sales in the US if they'd get their act together vis-a-vis the Net.
We Believe ANYTHING ANY Microsoft Employee Says
on
No Backdoor in Vista
·
· Score: 1
Here's what Spectrum Computer in San Francisco is offering:
AMD Value and Performance 64-bit Solutions $499
AMD Athlon-64 3000+ 1.8GHz 512K 939 Asus A8V-MX S939 mATX Mid-Tower ATX w/ 350WPS 512MB DDR400 Memory 160GB SATA 7200RPM HDD PowerColor Ati Radeon 9550 256MB agp Onboard Realtekk ALC653 6CH CODEC Onboard Realtek RTL8210CL 10/100 LAN 16x DVDRW Dual Layer 1.44MB Floppy Drive Logitech KB + MC
Add any of the following LCD monitors: Aopen 17" LCD F2705-12S 12ms 450:1 Analog Black $220 Nspire 17" LCD N17 12ms Analog Black $223 Viewsonic 17" LCD VA702B 12ms Analog Black $239 Viewsonic 17" LCD VA-712b 8ms Analog/Digital Black/Silver DVI $249 Viewsonic 17" LCD VX-724 3ms Analog/Digital Black/Silver $304
Now compare the specs to the "Ultimate Budget Box" - Ars is out their mind.
ALWAYS buy your box from a bunch of Chinese guys operating out of a neighborhood store front. Nobody can beat them for prices because their overhead is basically zilch.
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There's good reason for concern.
An Israeli company in charge of US law enforcement wiretapping got caught selling wiretap info to drug dealers in LA. The FBI was also worried that Federal wiretap information was being supplied to the Mossad.
Israel has figured out that the best way to spy on everybody else is to be the country making all the security hardware and software. Brilliant.
It would behoove all companies to do due diligence as to exactly what connections the companies running their security hardware and software have to government agencies - either through the employment histories of the company officers or through government funding sources as is the case with many Israeli companies. Industrial espionage is a state-sponsored activity in many countries.
I wouldn't touch CheckPoint with a ten foot pole after this.
with one of my own DOC files. It opened it and displayed it properly. Fair enough, although it wasn't a terribly complicated document - a one page affair with some bold, centering, etc.
However, if you look at the available menu, this thing doesn't even come close to Microsoft Word functionality. You can adjust the fonts, alignment, etc., basic stuff like that, and apparently insert a table (I didn't test that), but the rest of Word's functionality simply doesn't exist.
Nice try, Mike. Come back in a year when you've got something that really does the job.
Why do people try to convince people that some product does things it doesn't even come close to doing? Do they assume everyone is simply deaf, dumb and blind?
Probably SAIC - the CIA front company the Bush crime family uses for a lot of shady stuff.
In any event, whatever company it was, look for the names Bush the Elder, James Baker, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al, on the board of directors either present or past.
That or the company is owned by the Carlyle Group.
Or it's an Israeli company. We gave an Israeli company the contracts to run our law enforcement wire tapping operation - until employees got caught selling wiretap data to drug dealers in LA. The same company also offers mass transit video surveillance systems - like the one in the London Underground that got bombed.
Israel has figured out that the best way to spy on the world is to make the security gadgets the world depends on. That's why you have tons of Israeli security and technology companies like Checkpoint firewall. Now that I know that, rely on a Checkpoint firewall? I don't think so.
Our ol' buddy, Rob.
Enuff said. This is Microsoft PR fluff material.
But just in case it isn't enuff said...
If they enhance IE 7 to prevent ANY ActiveX control from working by default, it will damage the usability of the idiot Web sites that use that crap. Therefore we can KNOW that despite their claims for IE7 being enhanced to prevent writing anywhere except to temporary files, ActiveX will still be turned on by default.
Worse, there is nothing preventing IE7 from writing spyware to a temporary file, and then the spyware writing itself anywhere it wants (subject to whatever user account controls MS is also implementing.) Only by locking down the system so that NOTHING but the OS runs without first being given permission at least once can spyware be prevented - and that only if the end user understands what programs are spyware and what aren't. A lot of spyware is disguised as pointless but cute programs offering some minor functionality.
Also, a LOT of spyware today virtually takes over the OS - making the files invisible, hard to find and almost impossible to remove without System privilege, let alone Administrator privilege.
I doubt very much that Microsoft's little enhancement of end user privileges and restrictive sandboxing is going to slow down spyware one jot. There are too many hackers making money producing these things to let some MS monkeys figure out how to beat them.
You forget - Microsoft has around 40,000 monkeys.
Much more efficient.
And a gorilla who throws chairs.
This phrase needs to be struck from the propaganda rolls.
Or better, re-applied to anything coming out of the White House since the US has murdered more children over the last twenty years than just about anybody, counting the Iraq sanctions and the Iraq invasion.
I wonder why I'm running Mandriva 2006 with absolutely no problems (except the incredibly stupid menu editor, of course, which everyone acknowledges is braindead.)
Everything on my machine (your standard clone) worked out of the box. I think the DSL setup wasn't as nice as Knoppix, but then nobody else's is any better that I'm aware of.
So they fired the guy who created the company. Big deal. Happens every day. I have yet to see anybody demonstrate that this means anything about where the distro is going or how easy future versions will be to use or anything else of significance. When it happens, call me.
And if it does go bad, well, there's plenty of other distros to try. Everybody is touting Ubuntu/Kubuntu. So far I've seen no reason to switch absent some major failing of Mandriva that might crop up. It's not hard for a distro to piss me off, though, so maybe it will happen here, too.
I just read a review of Fedora Core where it's clear those idiots STILL haven't figured out how to do decent package management - now, instead of the perfectly usable KPackage from back in 7.3 days, they've got TWO package managers installed, NEITHER of which show you the dependencies or where the files are installed.
Morons.
So why am I bothering to comment on this at all? Good question...
Reread the article - look at the amount of data they were backing up. Figure out how many tapes they needed to use every day to do that - then figure the odds if even a couple percent of them fail periodically.
And you verify your data nightly and still had a failure - even after cleaning the drive every two weeks. What more do you need to know? When's the last time you "cleaned a disk?"
When's the last time you did a disk check and then had a failure to read a sector? Most disks today don't even report bad sectors - they map them out - until the disk is near failing.
Tape is history for anything but archival and last-ditch disaster recovery.
Removability is not an issue.
The problem is trying to compare the cost of a removable container to the VALUE of the DATA and the risk factor of losing that data. There simply is no comparison. The cost of the hardware is minimal compared to the data value.
However, I will agree that a removable container WILL increase the risk, possibly comparable to the level of tape (a removable media). That is why backup over the network is better. I agree that many smaller companies might not be able to afford this.
However, smaller companies also don't have the volume necessary to justify large tape backup systems either. A smaller company can get probably get by with archival/disaster recovery backup to a removable disk - or even DVD backup if the backups are incremental instead of differential. Using incremental backups is not an issue if the backups are archival rather than recovery. So in the end a large company can afford network backup and can use that to avoid the issues of removable media, where a smaller company can afford removable media and use that to avoid the expense of a network backup.
Besides, as I pointed out, there is also a difference between archival backup and "disaster recovery" backup. Tape is adequate for archival because while it is possible the data may need to be restored, the company's operations are not at risk if it isn't (other than legal risk if the data is needed for legal reasons). Tape is also adequate for disaster recovery because under the conditions of a disaster, quick recovery is not required.
Operational recovery, as you correctly point out, is perfectly suited to disk backup.
I fully agree that there are a number of backup issues and they all have to be addressed with the procedures and technology suitable for each issue.
The other posts responding to this made most of my points.
r eID=2254&printerfriendly=1
The idea that the read heads on a disk drive are particularly vulnerable compared to tape read heads is nonsense.
Hard drives are less vulnerable to failure than tape drives - and more importantly FAR less vulnerable than TAPE MEDIA.
It's the MEDIA that is vulnerable in tape - and responsible for most of the backup failures using tape.
There's no way tape can compete with disk for reliability.
This article from Techworld about the Baptist Memorial Health Care chain demonstrates the issues involved: http://www.techworld.com/features/index.cfm?featu
Money quote:
"People's lives will be affected by how well this works," Weiss says. "We are also saving brain cells," he adds. "This is a technology that we do not need to think about. It simply does its job. The stress of not knowing whether backups/restores will work is gone. Our backup failure rate has gone from more than 30% to absolute zero, and we have not had a backup/restore failure since installation."
Here we go again.
Tape has fewer points of failure than a hard drive?
Oh, please...
Explain to me why the entire industry is moving to disk-to-disk recovery backup with tape relegated to archival backup.
Explain to me why most data is kept on hard drives for day to day use if they are so failure prone.
Optimum backup requires disk-to-disk for quick and absolutely reliable recovery. For security, disk-to-disk over the network to an offsite location allows for fully automated reliable offsite backup, but it is expensive in bandwidth even if you only transmit deltas. For offsite storage where netword bandwidth is not available or too expensive, for long-term archival storage, tape is useful - provided the tapes are maintained properly, stored properly and not overused.
Modern tape systems can be very fast and very large, and can cost less than equivalent capacity disk drives, but the fact of the matter is that industry studies show more problems with tape backups than with disk backups. Between equipment failure and operator error, tape backup is problematical for recovery purposes.
Just had a client who was installing his Mac and wanted me to hook him up to the Internet.
First thing he asked was, what did he need to be secure from the viruses?
I told him there ARE NO VIRUSES for Mac OSX. And damn little spyware - so little that no one has written an open source anti-spyware tool for the Mac, although there are one or two commercial products probably not worth buying.
I pointed him to ClamXav anyway, but told him that was just for protecting him from forwarding an email infected from a Windows machine to another Windows machine.
Can you imagine the lawsuits?
They're gone.
This may be a wakeup call for software quality assurance.
I mean, this indicates that McAfee simply IS NOT testing its updates on real live machines with a variety of software. I mean, delete MICROSOFT OFFICE FILES? C'mon, that PROVES these idiots aren't testing anything.
It needs extermination.
Well, okay, that's an overstatement - maybe. MOST of humanity needs exterminating, not all. That better?
Nonetheless, Bill Joy just doesn't get it. His Wired article was bullshit.
Freitas at least has some clue. I don't agree with ANY "total bans" on any sort of research, however. If you don't research it, you don't know where the dangers might actually be. And that will cost you in the long run more than taking a certain amount of risk. The notion that somebody is going to create an actual "grey goo" sufficient to do a significant amount of damage to anybody is highly speculative at best. Using this to justify a "total ban" on artificial life research in non-biological contexts is simply too extreme a position.
Most of these people are trying to make a name for themselves in nanotech by digging up "issues" they can exploit. Fine, no problem. Just don't take these "issues" seriously as it's entirely speculative at this point. It's on a par with worrying about AI taking over the world - back in 1965.
Besides, as I indicated, who says that's a bad outcome?
Well, speaking about focus stealing, what really annoys me about the File Save dialog in Mandriva Linux, when I'm saving a Web page from Firefox, is when the list of files comes up in the directory I want to save the new page in, the focus is on the list of files, NOT in the file name text box where I want to name the new file. The name of the Web page is in the box and highlighted for deletion, but when I start typing the new file name, the focus is in the file list and moves the highlight there to the file closest to what I'm typing.
This is completely inane. It might be correct for a file OPEN dialog, but it's wrong for a file SAVE dialog.
Also, I have to click to open the "Browse for Other Folders" section of the dialog if I want to change what file type the file is saved as. This should be open all the time to avoid that unncessary mouse click. I changed it to save a Web page as a text file when that was appropriate, then forgot to open it as I saved other Web pages for which that file type was not appropriate. Had the dialog been open, I might have noticed I was saving file with the wrong file type.
There's also no way to delete files and directories from the file save dialog, which I miss from Windows. If I've incorrectly saved a file and now want to get rid of that file and resave it with the correct file name, I have to go to Kongueror to delete the file either before or after saving it with the correct file name. Being able to delete from the file save or file open dialogs is much more efficient.
All in all, the file save/open dialog is adequate, but needs to be tweaked to be better - and not just to look like Windows, but to have the same functionality - functionality that is needed.
But you're absolutely correct about the Registry. I don't know how many times I've seen Windows hose itself with no way to determine what it did, because some Registry key got changed, necessitating a reinstall to correct the problem. Even Microsoft acknowledges this because they provide various tools to repair the Registry keys, especially when the IP stack is damaged by a bad uninstall of some antivirus or commo software. I had one client where I simply uninstalled a not-wanted McAfee AV program, and the Windows XP system would no longer communicate with a Linksys router. Dell required the OS be reinstalled from the recovery partition - problem solved. Unless one is an expert in every single one of the fifty thousand or more keys in a Windows XP Registry, as well as the thousands of keys installed by every one of the proprietary programs on the system, it is utterly impossible to debug many Windows problems via the Registry in many cases.
Don't even mention the Windows Server editions! I've had labs in college courses on Windows Server fail to function with absolutely no clue why - even the teacher was unable to determine the cause of the problem and even when a student next to me was able to make it work following the exact same steps. It's like Windows sometimes RANDOMLY updates and corrupts the Registry!
One reason Linux is so stable is because its text config files don't get updated by every Tom, Dick and Harry program running. They're updated once by the user - either directly or by a GUI front-end, and after that they're untouched. And if they are screwed up, you can SEE it and figure out how to fix it. The Registry? Good luck with that!
I mean, both sides are as usual exaggerating the value of their positions.
What matters is functionality and usability. If Linux can match Windows in functionality, and if Linux is easily usable, it doesn't matter whether the technigues used are the same as Windows.
It only matters from the viewpoint of those people who wish to lure Windows users into using Linux. While it is true that most people, as one of my instructors likes to say, "use computers because they have to, not because they want to", this doesn't need to have any significant effect on Linux adoption, provided that the functionality and usability are there. Re-training is not that big a hassle IF properly done.
Most corporations are not going to switch to Linux just for improvements in usability or even functionality. They are going to switch for other reasons: cost, security, flexibility, lack of vendor lock-in. They will only switch for functionality if that functionality is mission-critical. Once the decision is made, people will either be re-trained or required to learn the new systems themselves.
Comparing vi and Microsoft Word on keystrokes is abysmally stupid. Vi is an overly complicated mess of un-usability. The learning curve is so ridiculous that nobody but a geek would even try to use it. The same applies to Emacs. Neither of them is intended to be a word processor, which is by definition designed for end users, not geeks. Even if Word needs more keystrokes than vi to do a particular task, this says nothing about why those keystrokes were chosen. While I wouldn't doubt that Microsoft designers are less capable of designing efficient keystrokes than Linux designers, just comparing the keystrokes doesn't tell you why it was designed that way. There may have been good reasons for using those particular keystrokes. My point is that comparing two totally difference systems - even if the function being compared is identical - based on keystrokes is utterly irrelevant to the usability issue, and by definition irrelevant to the functionality issue.
There was recently an article elsewhere about how GIMP wasn't as good as PhotoShop. As usual, everyone said it didn't need to be as the GIMP developers didn't care about that, and further, that no one had the right to ask that GIMP be equal in usability to PhotoShop as that was abrogating the rights of the GIMP developers to go their own way.
This is incorrect reasoning. The issue is whether GIMP is intended to be the best graphics program in terms of functionality and usability. The second - and different - issue is whether it can be recommended to Windows users as a replacement for PhotoShop in order to lure Windows users to Linux. The two questions are entirely different. If the GIMP has functionality and usability problems - and it does either when COMPARED to PhotoShop or in some cases on its own merits - then it should be changed to solve those problems . Whether the GUI is changed to look like PhotoShop or not is not relevant EXCEPT to those people on Windows who don't want to learn a new GUI. THAT is not the GIMP developers problem, clearly. But if the GIMP developers do not INTEND to develop GIMP to the same level of usability and functionality, they should say so, and people should then stop recommending the GIMP as a replacement for PhotoShop.
It does OSS no good to recommend OSS products that do not adequately replace their Windows counterparts. It's okay to recommend OSS products that are less functional for those people who do not NEED that extra functionality. It is not okay to recommend OSS products for those people who DO need that extra functionality. Saying that GIMP is a replacement for PhotoShop without specifying the limits on functionality and usability is not helping OSS because when the faults are experienced, the new user will feel cheated. Any recommendation of OSS software to users of other software should acknowledge any significant differences in usability or functionality. That is, if the product doesn't do a certain thing, say s
Not unless you fix the voting machines.
The fact of the matter is, no matter who the Democrats run, he isn't going to be but a hair different than Bush in his policies.
So the vote will be close - and the voting machine fraud, which is sewed up by the Republicans, will make the difference.
You might get back control of the House or Senate, but that's about it. Getting impeachment is a pipe dream.
And with Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton, you might as well be Republican anyway.
Uhm, that may be true in certain cases, but it's not hard to get people in the military to fight against someone OTHER than their own families - like everybody else's families.
After, the military is used in most countries to repress its own citizens.
Consider that 55 million people voted for Bush's policies. It wouldn't be hard to get a bunch of them to join a Gestapo or the military to suppress the rest. Just read the posts here and elsewhere sometime. Most of these morons are wannabe fascists.
The entire issue boils down to: can you get at least five percent of the population ready to either take up arms against the government or support those who do?
In this country - no way, Jose.
But you could easily get five percent to become Gestapo here.
You're forgetting Iraq, which is doing very well indeed using former soldiers to train civilian insurgents.
Tanks, nukes, jets and the like don't work so well with their pilots shot in the head. Watch the Iraqi sniper video some time, or any of the IED videos out of Iraq.
The same would happen in the US - IF the US had any citizens with balls, which it doesn't.
Some months back I finally decided to upgrade my 1.5Mbps service to the 3Mbps. They had no problem letting me do that and charging me $20 less per month than I had been paying.
Then I noticed I wasn't getting 3Mbps - I was only getting about 10% more speed than I had been getting before. I didn't mind too much since it was still costing me $20 less than it had. But finally I decided to find out why.
After SBC tech support referred me to ASI, their provisioner, it turns out I'm 12,000 feet away from the CO DSLAM. The tech said 3Mbps service was only for people at 10,000 feet or less. Not only that, if they raised me nearer to 3, my line would start experiencing drops more and more frequently until the line went down and stayed down. They set me back to 1.5Mbps. I had to renegotiate my cost with the Sales department which decided I should pay $26.95 a month for six months, after which it would go up to $30-something.
I see a class action lawsuit coming up here, as SBC sells 3Mbps upgrades to people who THEY KNOW can't handle the speed and THEY KNOW will damage their service and make it unreliable.
Not only that, but they're promising TWENTY Mbps service this year. How is any subscriber going to get that speed - by being twenty feet from the CO - when they can't even deliver 3Mbps?
If it doesn't make Bill any money...it ain't happening.
And paying other people more than they're getting now doesn't make him any money - in his opinion, at least.
The Microsoft employees should form a charitable foundation and let Bill "donate" his stock to it. Then he'd go for it since he could use it as a PR and stock laundering and corporate investment scheme like he does his own foundation. The employees could be paid out of the income of the foundation like the charities get their money.
of the music business.
Now, if only John Hughes, the manager of my favorite band, The Corrs, would get over his Net phobia about downloads and get with the program.
Their Web site is inadequate, they don't stream video, they don't record video of their concerts, they're seriously fucking up. I could probably get them another million album sales in the US if they'd get their act together vis-a-vis the Net.
Sure we do.
Fucking liars, the lot.
Humans are a virus.
Here's what Spectrum Computer in San Francisco is offering:
AMD Value and Performance 64-bit Solutions $499
AMD Athlon-64 3000+ 1.8GHz 512K 939
Asus A8V-MX S939 mATX
Mid-Tower ATX w/ 350WPS
512MB DDR400 Memory
160GB SATA 7200RPM HDD
PowerColor Ati Radeon 9550 256MB agp
Onboard Realtekk ALC653 6CH CODEC
Onboard Realtek RTL8210CL 10/100 LAN
16x DVDRW Dual Layer
1.44MB Floppy Drive
Logitech KB + MC
Add any of the following LCD monitors:
Aopen 17" LCD F2705-12S 12ms 450:1 Analog Black $220
Nspire 17" LCD N17 12ms Analog Black $223
Viewsonic 17" LCD VA702B 12ms Analog Black $239
Viewsonic 17" LCD VA-712b 8ms Analog/Digital Black/Silver DVI $249
Viewsonic 17" LCD VX-724 3ms Analog/Digital Black/Silver $304
Now compare the specs to the "Ultimate Budget Box" - Ars is out their mind.
ALWAYS buy your box from a bunch of Chinese guys operating out of a neighborhood store front. Nobody can beat them for prices because their overhead is basically zilch.