Actually I was just trying to make a joke but since you took the time to reply...
Well you could make that middle clause into a drop-in with a couple of commas:
It discusses a case in which an administrator, who set up back doors in the system with which he was trusted, deleted files which he could access after he was fired.
Actually if I had free reign to edit that sentence I'd probably do quite a bit more than that:
It discusses a case in which an administrator set up back doors in a system so that he could access deleted files even after he was fired.
Of course I'm having to make some assumptions about what he actually meant by that sentence. Did the administrator delete the files or could he just access all deleted files?
He's really got at least two sentences worth of material there and if he really wants to cram it into one he should have used some sort of punctuation, perhaps a semicolon.
Oh, and yes commas do exist simply for the purpose of being scattered about randomly (well maybe not totally randomly), the rules regarding the placement of commas are really rather vague and end up being mostly the authors prerogative. So long as they do more good than harm.
It discusses a case in which an administrator who set up back doors in the system with which he was trusted deleted files to which he could access after he was fired.
What is that sentence supposed to mean? Use a freaking comma!
What does the German economy have to do with anything? Just because AMD has a fab there doesn't mean that they are based there. Seems like the German economy being down would let them hire workers cheaper for the Fab 30 in Dresden.
Mmmmmm, Krispy Kreme... Actually, I think this would be a bad thing. Right now it's nice to stop at Krispy Kreme every few months when I drive through Issaquah, but if I lived next door, I'm afraid I would find myself morbidly obese and unable to leave the house. Of course, with sooper-l33t interweb access, I guess I wouldn't need to leave the house. Hooray!
Perhaps a little googling would have enlightened you as to what exactly an MTBF is. It's not quite as simple as it sounds:
(Thus spoketh the web page:)
It is generally accepted among reliability specialists (and you, therefore, must not question it) that a thing's failure rate isn't constant, but generally goes through three phases over a thing's lifetime. In the first phase the failure rate is relatively high, but decreases over time -- this is called the "infant mortality" phase (sensitive guys these reliability specialists). In the second phase the failure rate is low and essentially constant -- this is (imaginatively) called the "constant failure rate" phase. In the third phase the failure rate begins increasing again, often quite rapidly, -- this is called the "wearout" phase. The reliability specialists noticed that when plotted as a function of time the failure rate resembled a familiar bathroom appliance -- but they called it a "bathtub" curve anyway. The units of failure rate are failures per unit of "thing-time"; e.g. failures per machine-hour or failures per system-year.
What, you may ask, does all this have to do with MTBF? MTBF is the inverse of the failure rate in the constant failure rate phase. Nothing more and nothing less. The units of MTBF are (or, should be) units of "thing-time" pre failure; e.g. machine-hours per failure or system-years per failure but the "thing" part and the "per failure" part are almost always omitted to enhance the mystique and confusion and to make MTBF appear to have the units of "time" which it doesn't. We will bow to the convention of speaking of MTBF in hours or years -- but we all know what we really mean.
What does MTBF have to do with lifetime? Nothing at all! It is not at all unusual for things to have MTBF's which significantly exceed their lifetime as defined by wearout -- in fact, you know many such things. A "thirty-something" American (well within his constant failure rate phase) has a failure (death) rate of about 1.1 deaths per 1000 person-years and, therefore, has an MTBF of 900 years (of course its really 900 person-years per death). Even the best ones, however, wear out long before that.
This example points out one other important characteristic of MTBF -- it is an ensemble characteristic which applies to populations (i.e. "lots") of things; not a sample characteristic which applies to one specific thing. In the good old days when failure rates were relatively high (and, therefore, MTBF relatively low) this characteristic of MTBF was a curiosity which created lively (?) debate at conventions of reliability specialists (them) but otherwise didn't unduly bother right-thinking people (us). Things, however, have changed. For many systems of interest today the required failure rates are so low that the MTBF substantially exceeds the lifetime (obviously nature had this right a long time ago). In these cases MTBF's are not only "not necessarily" sample characteristics, but are "necessarily not" sample characteristics. In the terms of the reliability cognoscenti, failure processes are not ergodic (i.e. you can't blithely trade population statistics for time statistics). The key implication of this essential characteristic of MTBF is that it can only be determined from populations and it should only be applied to populations.
MTBF is, therefore an excellent characteristic for determining how many spare hard drives are needed to support 1000 PC's, but a poor characteristic for guiding you on when you should change your hard drive to avoid a crash.
Well this WD drive does sport a 1.2 million hour MTBF and 5 year warantee. It's pretty much built with reliability in mind since they are targetting entry- and mid-level servers.
Hope that crisis counselor over at that data recovery place is ready for one heck of a call in about 12 months.
Not that I'm a SCSI fanboy, but if he's buying the cheapest IDE drives I hope he's also planning to invest some money in one of these or something. I'm pretty sure that regardless of what he's putting on there, he'd be disappointed to lose that much data. I mean, imagine the amount of time you would have to invest to collect that much warez and porn.
I just discovered Konstruct with the KDE 3.1 release and I'm very impressed. It's a collection of Makefiles that allow you to use these two commands to install KDE 3.1:
cd meta/kde make install
That's it. It downloads, checksums, extracts, compiles, and installs everything in the right order. I set it to running (installed a libpcre-dev package when it complained) and let it go overnight. When I woke up in the morning I logged out and logged back in and bam, I was using KDE 3.1. Very slick.
I was worried that since I had KDE 3.0 installed from packages (RPM's from Mandrake 9) that it would have trouble getting everything installed and working smoothly from sources, but I didn't have to do anything.
There are other subdirectories that let you do the same thing for koffice, quanta, and several other parts of the new release.
Consider their positions regarding our signed commitments and treaties vs. our Oil interests (Kyoto treaty).
The United States has never signed the Kyoto Treaty. Then again, neither has China (worlds second largest polluter) or India. According to revised estimates, implementing the Kyoto Treaty would increase gas prices in the USA upwards of 60 cents per gallon and cost tens of billions more per year in direct costs to the government, not to mention wide reaching economic reprecussions.
With regards to North Korea, why doesn't somebody else deal with them? Everyone else is complaining about how the USA is threatening to act unilaterally against Iraq, yet when a very similar situation arises in North Korea, all I hear is "why isn't the USA doing something about them?".
(Never let the opportunity to use a good Stewie quote (with a little editing) slip you by, that's my mantra...)
Oh gosh that's funny. That's really funny. Do you write your own material? Do you? Because that is so fresh. "People in Florida can't vote..." I've never heard anyone make that joke before. Mmm. You're the first. I've never heard anyone reference, um reference that outside the news before. Because that's the problem they had in the last presidential electrion, right? And yet you've taken that, and used it out of context, to insult them in this everyday situation. Gosh, what a clever, smart girl you must be, to come up with a joke like that by your self. Mmm. That's so fresh, too. Any Titanic jokes you want to throw at me while we're hitting these phenomena at the height of their popularity? Because I'm right here. God you're so funny!
Postgres has had stored procedures for a while, look up CREATE FUNCTION. But adding better support for result sets does make them quite a bit more useful, now if only there was a decent JDBC driver that implemented result sets more completely.
Well, since currency exchange rates are constantly fluctuating, the more specific you are, the more approximate you are really. For instance when I just did the conversion it came out to like $40.80. But you're right, they really should have just said "about $40."
If you're however looking for a harddisk that offers an impressive combination of performance and low noise then look no further than Seagate's ST380021A Barracuda IV, it really is an engineering marvel that combines the best of both worlds. No match for the IBM or Western Digital but a fair trade-off between performance and noise level.
I too have been very impressed by the Barracuda IV's, they are put near silent and come in nice round 20GB increments. I've built probably a dozen systems with various sizes of this drive in them and have yet to see one go flaky.
As a white-box maker, performance isn't foremost in my selection criteria, reliability is and these Seagates are about the only drive I've used that I haven't had some sort of issue with. As an added bonus, they are usually $10-$15 cheaper than a Maxtor or WD of the same capacity and RPM.
Aren't AMRAAM's air-to-air missiles? Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile? Sounds like this is for air-to-ground so it would be more a replacement for things like HARM's. But the HARM is rader guided and has a range much longer than ~6km. But there is the advantage of the laser not having much of a time-in-transit.:)
The limitataion of a traditional ramdisk is that the most available DIMM slots I've seen in a fairly normal motherboard is 4. Assuming that they all took 1024mb modules, that's still only 4gb and you still need to have regular RAM for your machine.
I'm not really concerned about booting from the device, it would just be handy to be able to cache data there that was frequently and intensively used. The battery backup would be mostly for fairly instantaneous power failures, not more time than a few minutes, hopefully any machine you could afford to invest a couple thousand dollars in for this drive, could also afford to buy a UPS. I would also have the drive flush itself back to disk on shutdown.
I'm not saying my idea is without it's issues, but a ramdisk really isn't what I was trying to replace. More like emulating a really fast hard drive.
Why do I get the feeling you can't just drop in a stick of memory you just ordered from Crucial into one of these things?:) Seems like more than the very largest database apps could benefit if you could push the cost down to a 2 or 3 large.
What I've been wondering recently is why someone doesn't pack a bunch of ECC DDR DIMMS into a 5 1/4" drive bay along with a backup battery and some circuitry to interface it to IDE or SCSI. Make it flexible and you could have an upgradable drive that could max out it's IDE/SCSI interface for *sustained* reads and write, not just bursts like a normal disk. How hard would it be to design a dedicated memory controller that could talk to like 6 or 8 DIMMs abstract them to an IDE/SCSI interface ala ramdisk?
Maybe it's really hard to do or there is just too small a market...
But if somebody reads this and builds one...I at least want a couple free samples.:)
Maybe they are focusing a little more on the *game* servers: "We've been working feverishly since 4 July, adding sixty more servers (now totaling 110 coast-to-coast)..."
BTW: The site came up pretty much instantly for me, and I downloaded the game in about 5 minutes (from Nvidia, with swarming).
"We are now making a range of Simputers with different configurations and prices ranging from 10,500 to 23,000 rupees," he said. Equivalent to roughly $214 to $469, this figure compares to average annual Indian per capita income of about $450.
Isn't $214 less than $450? Am I missing something?
Some of the math and physics teachers at my school got together and took some pictures through telescopes with real solar filters of the eclipse. They are pretty good, you can see sunspots and stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I was just trying to make a joke but since you took the time to reply...
Well you could make that middle clause into a drop-in with a couple of commas:
It discusses a case in which an administrator, who set up back doors in the system with which he was trusted, deleted files which he could access after he was fired.
Actually if I had free reign to edit that sentence I'd probably do quite a bit more than that:
It discusses a case in which an administrator set up back doors in a system so that he could access deleted files even after he was fired.
Of course I'm having to make some assumptions about what he actually meant by that sentence. Did the administrator delete the files or could he just access all deleted files?
He's really got at least two sentences worth of material there and if he really wants to cram it into one he should have used some sort of punctuation, perhaps a semicolon.
Oh, and yes commas do exist simply for the purpose of being scattered about randomly (well maybe not totally randomly), the rules regarding the placement of commas are really rather vague and end up being mostly the authors prerogative. So long as they do more good than harm.
It discusses a case in which an administrator who set up back doors in the system with which he was trusted deleted files to which he could access after he was fired.
What is that sentence supposed to mean? Use a freaking comma!
Yeesh.
What does the German economy have to do with anything? Just because AMD has a fab there doesn't mean that they are based there. Seems like the German economy being down would let them hire workers cheaper for the Fab 30 in Dresden.
More importantly, there is a Krispy Kreme right down the street!
Mmmmmm, Krispy Kreme... Actually, I think this would be a bad thing. Right now it's nice to stop at Krispy Kreme every few months when I drive through Issaquah, but if I lived next door, I'm afraid I would find myself morbidly obese and unable to leave the house. Of course, with sooper-l33t interweb access, I guess I wouldn't need to leave the house. Hooray!
-Sokie
Hey man, I don't make the news, I just report it.
Perhaps a little googling would have enlightened you as to what exactly an MTBF is. It's not quite as simple as it sounds:
(Thus spoketh the web page:)
It is generally accepted among reliability specialists (and you, therefore, must not question it) that a thing's failure rate isn't constant, but generally goes through three phases over a thing's lifetime. In the first phase the failure rate is relatively high, but decreases over time -- this is called the "infant mortality" phase (sensitive guys these reliability specialists). In the second phase the failure rate is low and essentially constant -- this is (imaginatively) called the "constant failure rate" phase. In the third phase the failure rate begins increasing again, often quite rapidly, -- this is called the "wearout" phase. The reliability specialists noticed that when plotted as a function of time the failure rate resembled a familiar bathroom appliance -- but they called it a "bathtub" curve anyway. The units of failure rate are failures per unit of "thing-time"; e.g. failures per machine-hour or failures per system-year.
What, you may ask, does all this have to do with MTBF? MTBF is the inverse of the failure rate in the constant failure rate phase. Nothing more and nothing less. The units of MTBF are (or, should be) units of "thing-time" pre failure; e.g. machine-hours per failure or system-years per failure but the "thing" part and the "per failure" part are almost always omitted to enhance the mystique and confusion and to make MTBF appear to have the units of "time" which it doesn't. We will bow to the convention of speaking of MTBF in hours or years -- but we all know what we really mean.
What does MTBF have to do with lifetime? Nothing at all! It is not at all unusual for things to have MTBF's which significantly exceed their lifetime as defined by wearout -- in fact, you know many such things. A "thirty-something" American (well within his constant failure rate phase) has a failure (death) rate of about 1.1 deaths per 1000 person-years and, therefore, has an MTBF of 900 years (of course its really 900 person-years per death). Even the best ones, however, wear out long before that.
This example points out one other important characteristic of MTBF -- it is an ensemble characteristic which applies to populations (i.e. "lots") of things; not a sample characteristic which applies to one specific thing. In the good old days when failure rates were relatively high (and, therefore, MTBF relatively low) this characteristic of MTBF was a curiosity which created lively (?) debate at conventions of reliability specialists (them) but otherwise didn't unduly bother right-thinking people (us). Things, however, have changed. For many systems of interest today the required failure rates are so low that the MTBF substantially exceeds the lifetime (obviously nature had this right a long time ago). In these cases MTBF's are not only "not necessarily" sample characteristics, but are "necessarily not" sample characteristics. In the terms of the reliability cognoscenti, failure processes are not ergodic (i.e. you can't blithely trade population statistics for time statistics). The key implication of this essential characteristic of MTBF is that it can only be determined from populations and it should only be applied to populations.
MTBF is, therefore an excellent characteristic for determining how many spare hard drives are needed to support 1000 PC's, but a poor characteristic for guiding you on when you should change your hard drive to avoid a crash.
(An excerpt from this page.)
-Sokie
Well this WD drive does sport a 1.2 million hour MTBF and 5 year warantee. It's pretty much built with reliability in mind since they are targetting entry- and mid-level servers.
-Sokie
hmmm, 17 of the cheapest IDE drives....
Hope that crisis counselor over at that data recovery place is ready for one heck of a call in about 12 months.
Not that I'm a SCSI fanboy, but if he's buying the cheapest IDE drives I hope he's also planning to invest some money in one of these or something. I'm pretty sure that regardless of what he's putting on there, he'd be disappointed to lose that much data. I mean, imagine the amount of time you would have to invest to collect that much warez and porn.
I just discovered Konstruct with the KDE 3.1 release and I'm very impressed. It's a collection of Makefiles that allow you to use these two commands to install KDE 3.1:
cd meta/kde
make install
That's it. It downloads, checksums, extracts, compiles, and installs everything in the right order. I set it to running (installed a libpcre-dev package when it complained) and let it go overnight. When I woke up in the morning I logged out and logged back in and bam, I was using KDE 3.1. Very slick.
I was worried that since I had KDE 3.0 installed from packages (RPM's from Mandrake 9) that it would have trouble getting everything installed and working smoothly from sources, but I didn't have to do anything.
There are other subdirectories that let you do the same thing for koffice, quanta, and several other parts of the new release.
http://konsole.kde.org/konstruct/
Just in case you weren't aware of it, Sapphire makes a Radeon 9700 Pro with no fans. Mmmmm, quiet and fast. Mmmmmmm.
Atlantis 9700 Pro Ultimate
The United States has never signed the Kyoto Treaty. Then again, neither has China (worlds second largest polluter) or India. According to revised estimates, implementing the Kyoto Treaty would increase gas prices in the USA upwards of 60 cents per gallon and cost tens of billions more per year in direct costs to the government, not to mention wide reaching economic reprecussions.
Even former Cliton administration officials agree that the treaty is flawed.
With regards to North Korea, why doesn't somebody else deal with them? Everyone else is complaining about how the USA is threatening to act unilaterally against Iraq, yet when a very similar situation arises in North Korea, all I hear is "why isn't the USA doing something about them?".
Seems strange to me...
(Never let the opportunity to use a good Stewie quote (with a little editing) slip you by, that's my mantra...)
Oh gosh that's funny. That's really funny. Do you write your own material? Do you? Because that is so fresh. "People in Florida can't vote..." I've never heard anyone make that joke before. Mmm. You're the first. I've never heard anyone reference, um reference that outside the news before. Because that's the problem they had in the last presidential electrion, right? And yet you've taken that, and used it out of context, to insult them in this everyday situation. Gosh, what a clever, smart girl you must be, to come up with a joke like that by your self. Mmm. That's so fresh, too. Any Titanic jokes you want to throw at me while we're hitting these phenomena at the height of their popularity? Because I'm right here. God you're so funny!
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Postgres has had stored procedures for a while, look up CREATE FUNCTION. But adding better support for result sets does make them quite a bit more useful, now if only there was a decent JDBC driver that implemented result sets more completely.
-Sokie
Well, since currency exchange rates are constantly fluctuating, the more specific you are, the more approximate you are really. For instance when I just did the conversion it came out to like $40.80. But you're right, they really should have just said "about $40."
-Sokie
I too have been very impressed by the Barracuda IV's, they are put near silent and come in nice round 20GB increments. I've built probably a dozen systems with various sizes of this drive in them and have yet to see one go flaky.
As a white-box maker, performance isn't foremost in my selection criteria, reliability is and these Seagates are about the only drive I've used that I haven't had some sort of issue with. As an added bonus, they are usually $10-$15 cheaper than a Maxtor or WD of the same capacity and RPM.
Just my experience...ymmv....
-Sokie
Aren't AMRAAM's air-to-air missiles? Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile? Sounds like this is for air-to-ground so it would be more a replacement for things like HARM's. But the HARM is rader guided and has a range much longer than ~6km. But there is the advantage of the laser not having much of a time-in-transit. :)
-Sokie
...but those first 2 shots of the "arcs" from his "Tesla coils" look a hell of a lot like the lightning effect from Photoshop.
:)
Maybe not, but with no actual details on the page...I'm skeptical.
-Sokie
The limitataion of a traditional ramdisk is that the most available DIMM slots I've seen in a fairly normal motherboard is 4. Assuming that they all took 1024mb modules, that's still only 4gb and you still need to have regular RAM for your machine.
I'm not really concerned about booting from the device, it would just be handy to be able to cache data there that was frequently and intensively used. The battery backup would be mostly for fairly instantaneous power failures, not more time than a few minutes, hopefully any machine you could afford to invest a couple thousand dollars in for this drive, could also afford to buy a UPS. I would also have the drive flush itself back to disk on shutdown.
I'm not saying my idea is without it's issues, but a ramdisk really isn't what I was trying to replace. More like emulating a really fast hard drive.
-Sokie
Why do I get the feeling you can't just drop in a stick of memory you just ordered from Crucial into one of these things? :) Seems like more than the very largest database apps could benefit if you could push the cost down to a 2 or 3 large.
-Sokie
What I've been wondering recently is why someone doesn't pack a bunch of ECC DDR DIMMS into a 5 1/4" drive bay along with a backup battery and some circuitry to interface it to IDE or SCSI. Make it flexible and you could have an upgradable drive that could max out it's IDE/SCSI interface for *sustained* reads and write, not just bursts like a normal disk. How hard would it be to design a dedicated memory controller that could talk to like 6 or 8 DIMMs abstract them to an IDE/SCSI interface ala ramdisk?
:)
Maybe it's really hard to do or there is just too small a market...
But if somebody reads this and builds one...I at least want a couple free samples.
-Sokie
This is kind of like the pot calling the kettle black since you ripped off your post from Stewie's tyrade on Family Guy. But it was funny. :)
-Sokie
How about 1200 geeks with no ready, immediate access to showers?
Maybe they are focusing a little more on the *game* servers: "We've been working feverishly since 4 July, adding sixty more servers (now totaling 110 coast-to-coast)..."
BTW: The site came up pretty much instantly for me, and I downloaded the game in about 5 minutes (from Nvidia, with swarming).
-Sokie
Just like all those other British territorial holdings that are still under their control....
Oh wait...
Some of the math and physics teachers at my school got together and took some pictures through telescopes with real solar filters of the eclipse. They are pretty good, you can see sunspots and stuff.