Not being a climate scientist myself, I'd say that it's better to listen to the majority among those who are climate scientists when making important decisions in this regard. Unless I know something that they don't know -- something that I'm very, very sure of -- then I simply have to assume that the odds would not be in my favor if I were to oppose their wisdom. Yet many people, politicians especially, don't seem to understand this. Why?
It's similar to some of the most intractable problems involving our beloved Internet. While most of us would probably agrees that its birth marked a revolution in the development of our civilization, it seems that if it were up to the telecom and media industries, the clock would be turned back. It sounds crazy. Yet many people, politicians especially, seem to agree with them. Why?
In both cases the answer is the same: money talks, no matter how persuasive reason may be (let alone bullshit).
The problem is that the industries involved in these examples are extremely conservative. They know very well how things are and how they used to be. They also know that making any changes to their old and relatively successful business strategies is expensive and risky. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Unless they can think of a good reason for doing so on their own, that attitude always makes them inclined to resist changing their behavior. Lucky for them (and unfortunately for the rest of us), money has always been able to buy influence, of both the popular and the political kind.
Thus, reasoning and progressive people everywhere will always be forced to contend with the unreasoning and conservative influence of money and all of the ridiculous arguments that it causes.
As a sysadmin, in most of the places I've worked, particularly in the larger organizations that have been around for a while, the ages of the employees have been about the same: there are some younger ones, some older ones and a bunch in between. The young ones get paid less, while the old ones tend to have a better idea of how the organization works overall. Therefore, management will try to get rid of, or avoid, the older ones when they can simply because they are more expensive, but not that much more valuable. That's one way to look at it.
There's also another way to look at employees. On the one hand there are the dime-a-dozen types who are always needed for mundane tasks, but who are not good at working independently, solving difficult problems, recovering crashed systems, working in an organized fashion, writing coherent reports, etc. These people never constitute the brains of an organization's IT department. On the other hand there are the relatively rare people who actually do have good brains, are interested in the various technical challenges, solve difficult problems all the time, who write all the detailed reports and can be counted on when disaster strikes no matter when it does.
IMO, older IT people of the first type are much more likely to suffer from age-related discrimination than older IT people of the second type. In my experience, upper management always finds out who the really important people are in the IT department -- the people they know can be counted on to get things running again following a major incident.
The main problem for (prospective) employees of the second type is how to get recognized as such. Indeed, for an employer it's the much same: how to find these people and then how to retain their services.
Fiber optic technology that can deliver 100Mbps and even gigabit speeds over wide area distances has been around for years, so the reason it hasn't reached your doorstep yet isn't because it hasn't been invented yet. What's been standing in the way of progress all this time are the large telecom corporations that exploit all those local loops out there, those last miles of ancient copper that they're always promising to replace with something better, but always find a reason not to. No, as far as they're concerned it's always better to squeeze the last dime possible out of your investment if you can, especially when there's no real competition (something most of us can also thank our local governments for).
Last year I did some work that had to be coordinated with a group of programmers in Pakistan. Naturally they were using SSH to connect to the server they were hired to set up their software on. I can only imagine that companies like that are important for the economy other there. However, if the Pakistani government decides to ban all of its own people from using standard connectivity tools, all of which are encrypted these days for good reason, then they will be shooting their economy in the foot. Next thing we know, it will be impossible for people over there to conduct any more on-line financial transactions. In effect, they will be sending themselves back to the digital Stone Age. Meanwhile, the bad guys will just switch to using different port numbers.
The name of this project is horribly contrived and invented only to result in a certain cool acronym, which it does not! It's easy to see that someone spent some time thinking about the name, but obviously not enough.
Clearly the acronym for "Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets" is CLOD, and possibly CLOuD, but not CLOUD!
Was the lead author as incompetent and unimaginative with the rest of his project? If he conducted his research the same way he arrived at his acronym, it doesn't bode well! Of course, I could check by reading his paper, but since I refuse to pay Nature's subscription fee, I don't feel like giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Thanks, Rob, for what I think can be described as a significant contribution to Internet culture. You may have created/. simply as a way to share stories with your friends, but because those stories were a reflection of the type of person you are, and because your site allowed all of its visitors to interact, you unwittingly ended up creating a place that attracted a whole lot of people who were much like you. Like me. And all the rest of the folks who hang out here. And we all found out that there's way more people like us out there than we used to think! So, although its sad to hear of your departure, I will probably always be able to identify more with this site and its visitors than any other, simply because it will continue to attract the attentions of people like you, hopefully for a long time to come.
WARNING: what follows is the opinion of someone who has no intention of buying a tablet and has not used a smart phone for over a decade!
It assumes that there is actually more demand out there for tablets, only that the Android tablets just aren't good enough in the eyes of consumers to satisfy that demand. However, it could also be that Google's products are among the best around, but that there just isn't enough demand for tablets in general. I can imagine the latter being closer to the truth, in which case any M$ offer would probably do worse (they're incapable of making anything trendy anyway). After all, tablets are too large and unwieldy to compete with smart phones, while they don't have any killer apps either to set them apart from smart phones on the one hand, and laptops and PCs on the other. So far, tablets just seem to be rather like smart phones, except with bigger screens (the main attraction) and without the phone. They seem to me to be yet another gadget looking for a reason to exist -- as opposed to a novel solution to an actual problem.
In the early 90s, all CPUs were sold without coolers. They could get pretty hot, but that was considered normal. This was followed by a period in which you could buy CPU coolers separately, which made sense, because in those days overheating CPUs would crash and burn instead of shutting themselves down to avoid damage. Those early coolers were small and simple, but as the megahertz race between Intel and AMD began heating things up (in this case literally), the coolers got bigger and more expensive. This created a sizable market of which Intel and AMD decided they wanted a share, so they introduced slightly more expensive "boxed" versions of their products that included their own coolers. Now that these have been standard for years, I guess Intel is trying to get rid of them again in order to cut costs. If AMD follows suit, then I expect history will repeat itself: the 3rd party cooler market will expand, and some years later Intel and AMD will introduce "new" boxed versions of their products.
You say you're tired of Gmail and want to run your own mail server, that you don't mind getting your hands dirty and you call yourself a hobbyist. But, at the same time you maintain that you're not a sysadmin and normally prefer to outsource your mail servers. I hope you know how conflicted that sounds. After all, do you want to run your own mail server, or not?
I would recommend running Debian stable with a mail server based on Exim4 daemon heavy, along with SpamAssassin, Clam anti-virus, Razor and Pyzor to cut down on the spam. Actually, on my system over 90% of the spam -- the really obvious stuff -- gets identified and rejected by a bunch of custom filters (regular expressions) that I whipped up: points are awarded for things like a bad HELO, a bad sender domain or a bad reverse lookup... three strikes and you're out! Anything remotely non-obvious ends up in a spambox in the user's home directory. I've run it in this configuration since October 2010 and it has proved to be a very reliable and low-maintenance system that so far nobody has had any reason to complain about.
As for the mail clients, the remote ones are supported by dovecot servers for IMAP and POP3 (both SSL-only). I also support Horde, which is a web application framework that includes stuff like a calendar, a note pad, an address book and, of course, an email client. In my experience Horde has often been the most difficult piece of this puzzle to support, not because it's difficult to install or maintain, but because it's sometimes difficult to upgrade (part of that may be due to my preference for using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL; I've written my own migration scripts on several occasions). For those who persist and succeed, however, the payoff is that you can build up years worth of addresses, notes and calendar information that you can access from anywhere without having to rely on a third party to support the application.
Finally, all of these systems run on servers that are protected by stateful IPv4 and IPv6 firewalls and that are backed up automatically every night. The most important data, including the Horde database, is also backup up to remote systems. Oh, and all this is naturally built on systems with properly configured DNS stuff, interfaces, Internet connections and reverse lookups.
If this all sounds like too much system administration for you, I'm sorry, but to make it any less complicated would be to sacrifice functionality, security and/or reliability. Why don't more people run systems like this? Too complicated, I guess.
If you had a hybrid -- of the type that uses an internal combustion engine only to run a generator to charge up its battery -- that would also be capable of feeding its power back into the household circuit, then you'd be able to power your house for even longer.
When I first heard of K-Splice, I thought it was cool, but that didn't mean I was going to use it. I've used almost nothing but FOSS for just over a decade now. I've supporting it together with commercial products on a few occasions, but in the end have always felt limited, frustrated, or been let down by those products. Such experiences reminded me why I switched to FOSS in the first place; to stop hurting myself.
The open source community should have recognized K-Splice for what it was on day one -- a Good Thing -- but then immediately started work on a free alternative. Sometimes that doesn't happen because a closed-source alternative is already available, so fewer people are interested in developing a free alternative. That's never good. In this case, K-Splice customers probably thought they were paying a very reasonable price for a wonderful and unique product/service, but if they had known what was good for them, they would also have been spending a little extra on the side to sponsor some developers to produce a free alternative.
Don't get me wrong here: I have nothing per se against Linux developers selling closed source software by the license in order to earn a living. We could definitely use some more of those. The only problem is, there's no good reason to trust them any more than we would trust any other commercial software company: in the end, the interests of their customers always come last.
Well, I've only been using OpenAFS for a year, but so far it has treated me okay. Once, after a power outage, a number of volumes stopped replicating. I ended up having to salvage those and a number of user volumes, but no data was lost and no one seems to have noticed that anything was amiss.
... and not totally compatible with all softwares because it doesn't support all low-level io functions.
Yes, I've noticed that as a result some applications have insisted on saving things in my/home/ directory instead. For a while, GoogleEarth was one of those apps, but not anymore. Other apps are just coded badly, using/home/ instead of $HOME. So far I've had no trouble avoiding such applications (my office runs an Xfce environment).
The client kernel modules are also a headache...
Something I've had absolutely no problems with.
... and the Windoze one is unreliable.
That I can imagine. But, it's probably not easy to write network client software for an OS that has an an uneven playing field. My site has only two Windows workstations and the database apps running on them regularly have trouble saving their data to the network. I thought it was a problem with the AFS client, but no. The developer of that Windows app recently told us that it was a general problem that he just can't solve; he says that M$ is the problem and it doesn't matter which network client is used.
I think the idea is great, and it has some cool features, but now with other volume-management tools it is not a front-runner.
So, what are you using now instead of AFS?
I have spoken to people who are using M$ file servers with DFS, and they seems to be quite happy. But, I also know that 1.) their boss/client has had to shell out a lot of dough for that and 2.) they have to put up with a whole mess of Windows-related headaches that I simply don't have to deal with.
I used to dream of setting up an office network environment based on Linux and FOSS. Only, there there was one thing missing: a proper file system. That's why I think OpenAFS -- the distributed file system -- deserves more attention.
Most *nix fans use either NFS, which is simple, but scales badly and lacks encryption, or Samba, which was designed to support Windows clients. OpenAFS, on the other hand, offers file sharing and replicated read-only content distribution, provides location independence, scalability, security, and transparent migration capabilities. Client software includes support for UNIX, Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. The code base is very stable and it has an active development and support community.
As far as I'm concerned, Firefox could also use a DiskShrink team, although perhaps DiskPerformance would be more accurate. My site uses OpenAFS across several locations with 6Mbps to tie them together. The workstations run Debian squeeze with Xfce. It all works fine, but in the beginning we soon discovered that Firefox wasn't going to cut it. Although it was our preferred browser, even with its cache disabled it was too slow when the user volume, which contains the home directory, was not on the local file server. We ended up switching to Google Chrome, which is much faster in this respect.
For a website owner working together with a hosting provider that still has plenty of IPv4 addresses, why would you even want to move to IPv6-only? Especially when so many in the world aren't even running dual-stack? The only good reason that I've heard so far to set up an IPv6-only website is for testing purposes (You can't see this site unless you have IPv6!).
On the other hand, soon there will be plenty of people and organizations in the world, starting in Asia, that will be IPv6-only. Not because it's better, but because they won't have any choice! For those people, whether it will be useful or not to run IPv6-only will be entirely beside the point.
As for us here in the West, where our pools of free IPv4 addresses are not yet being rationed, that doesn't make it important for us to start running IPv6-only... it makes it important for us to start running dual-stack! Not just for the sake of the Asia-Pacific folks, but for ours too. The chances are good that one day you'll want to access something over there that happens only to have an IPv6 address.
One question that anyone in the world could ask is whether it is useful to run dual-stack -- even if you don't have to. In my experience, most definitely. True, it does require a bit of extra work that must be done properly, but afterwards the main advantage for me has been that, with no NATs that must be traversed, remote management is much easier than before.
The reason why Gates was so successful was not because he was an innovator, but because of countless acquisitions and the fact that he was able to get away with his unethical business practices for so long. It's how M$ gained its desktop monopoly. Which has since been eroding, not only because of the rise of Linux, Google, and Apple, but also because justice departments around the world have become more aware of how IT monopolies work, especially M$. Therefore, Gates can't come back and do it again with anything resembling the success that he had the first time around.
In the Netherlands, this has also been an issue for some time for exactly the same reasons. However, the lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry, the farming industry and one very large veterinary firm that sells the antibiotics directly to the farmers (giving them as much as they want and making way too much money in the process) seem to have far too much influence in the Hague, which is the seat of the Dutch government. With these rather influential veterinarians arguing that any restrictions placed upon them would be unfair and against EU trade rules, the government is now considering banning all veterinarians from selling their own drugs, forcing their clients to buy directly from normal pharmacies instead. That would be unfortunate, because these pharmacies only have experience with human medicine. Thus there would be the risk of the pharmacies giving or offering (cheaper) alternatives that may not work for dogs, cats, cows, sheep, etc. (apparently, there are plenty of examples of this). This is one of the reasons why vets are also trained as, and usually operate as pharmacists.
Too late. That just means that the Bill Gates Borg icon is becoming part of Slashdot lore. Newbies may not understand immediately, but they will if they stick around long enough. Besides, if we didn't allow for this sort of thing, how could we ever expect to develop our own culture? If instead Slashdot just followed whatever was trendy, then I think our days would be numbered. Of course, this may also mean that we will eventually die out, our sizable membership finally dwindling to a small number of old kooks, but even then I'd rather be a member of this club than of one of the trendier ones that come and go.
I find this kind of talk depressing. All you seem to care about is whether you any your buddies (America) are ahead or not. Why not just be happy that human spaceflight is advancing? Must you be reminded that the ISS is an international endeavor? Spaceflight is something that we should all be doing together. That way we can achieve far more than any one country can on its own.
KPN is a typical old-school telecom monopolist that, over the last two decades, has had to watch its market share and profits shrink. A few years ago their DSL network suffered a terrible outage that lasted for several weeks. The problem was their old ATM network equipment that just couldn't cope with the scale at which it was being used. Back in the end of the 90s, they had been warned by network experts that ATM was would eventually do this to them, but they didn't care. It was more important that it was cheap, and, and one KPN exec is rumored to have put it, "We zijn toch dominant" (We're dominant anyway). Since that's been their attitude towards consumers for, like, forever, so it doesn't surprise me that that they're also busy blazing new trails with DPI. Of course they want to use it to protect their investments, or else why tell investors about it?
If you do you'll always end up with FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) solutions and love your job. Either that or you'll end up with too much stuff that doesn't work and you'll hate your job.
That's the problem with this line of work. More than anything, sysadmins love stuff that works and it's often the grubby little details that make all the difference. However, it usually doesn't work out this way for them. If you're serious about your job, it won't take long before you to realize two important things about the world you live in:
* Commercial software companies just want your money
Unfortunately, it's not just about selling licenses (if only that were true): it's also about limiting the customers in what they can do with the products after they buy them. For instance, they typically use proprietary file formats, databases and protocols so that their products do not work with those of anyone else except their own, or those of their choosing. They call this "being competitive", but it's simply about limiting your choices so that they can steer you (the consumer) in whatever direction they want. They don't care about helping you to get everything to work they way you'd like, so functionality is severely limited. Basically, these companies just want your money, and preferably as much of it as they can get.
* FOSS developers just want things to work
These are the people who are on your side. They're just like you: they dream of systems that do everything you want and of users who are happy. Your system should be like that box of Lego blocks that you played with when you were a kid: everything fits together, even if now things are much more complex. This is accomplished by using open standards for file formats, databases and communications, as well as by providing the source code for the software.
What this means is that your success and happiness will depend on how much you can limit the use of commercial software in your network environment. Unfortunately, the average user (including your boss) has zero understanding of these concepts. Instead, their choices are much more likely to be influenced by a complex combination psychological factors, such as the marketing efforts of the big commercial software companies, their own limited experience, the advice of their favorite vendors and sales representatives, their desire to avoid learning to work with anything new, and even what their friends think they should do. In other words, unless they really respect you, your advice will not be taken seriously. Instead, they will likely tell you what software to work with and your efforts will ultimately be frustrating, the results disappointing. However, if you're lucky and good at explaining, maybe your boss won't blame you too much for the results.
The space shuttle was always too expensive, satellites are almost always better and cheaper than the SR-71, and high-speed passenger services were basically only useful for the very wealthy.
Here's a better way to look at the distance to Proxima Centauri: if the Milky Way galaxy is scaled down so that the distance from the Earth to the Sun (usually about 150 million km) is reduced to only 1 mm, then Pluto would be 4 cm from the Sun, but our nearest stellar neighbor would still be 267 m away. Oh, and the Oort Cloud would (theoretically) be 10 m in radius, the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy would be 6,327 km and the Andromeda galaxy would be 139,200 km from us.
IMO, in the best possible case it may be possible for our descendants to colonize most of our own solar system. However, considering the vast distances involved, I view it as unlikely that we will ever attempt interstellar travel... at least not on a regular basis and barring the invention of some revolutionary propulsion technology, such as a "warp engine".
What's more, even if we ever were to develop the capability of accelerating a large enough ship up to a significant fraction of the speed of light within a relatively short span of time, then we would still be faced with the problem of abrasion due to interstellar gas and dust. At those speeds, every speck of dust hitting the front of such a space ship would inflict an inordinate amount of damage. Therefore, another one of Gene Roddenberry's inventions would be needed: the deflector dish.
Face it: this universe just wasn't made for tourism.
Assuming that you found yourself sucked out of the cabin intact, perhaps low oxygen would not have to be a problem. It certainly would be if you were stationary at that altitude, but in this case you're falling. The question is, if you were falling face down in a free-fall position (belly to Earth), would the force of the air entering your mouth at terminal velocity (at least 195 km/h) increase the pressure of the air in your lungs enough to compensate for the altitude?
Remember, it's not the fraction of oxygen that decreases with increasing altitude -- that stays the same at 20%. It's the partial pressure of oxygen (PPO2) that decreases linearly with the ambient pressure. IIRC, we humans require a PPO2 of 0.12 bar to remain conscious, which is what you have at something like 12,000 feet (see this conversion table). At 30,000 ft the ambient pressure is only about 0.3 bar, so the speed of your descent would have to at least double the pressure in your lungs to compensate, which seems possible to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Not being a climate scientist myself, I'd say that it's better to listen to the majority among those who are climate scientists when making important decisions in this regard. Unless I know something that they don't know -- something that I'm very, very sure of -- then I simply have to assume that the odds would not be in my favor if I were to oppose their wisdom. Yet many people, politicians especially, don't seem to understand this. Why?
It's similar to some of the most intractable problems involving our beloved Internet. While most of us would probably agrees that its birth marked a revolution in the development of our civilization, it seems that if it were up to the telecom and media industries, the clock would be turned back. It sounds crazy. Yet many people, politicians especially, seem to agree with them. Why?
In both cases the answer is the same: money talks, no matter how persuasive reason may be (let alone bullshit).
The problem is that the industries involved in these examples are extremely conservative. They know very well how things are and how they used to be. They also know that making any changes to their old and relatively successful business strategies is expensive and risky. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Unless they can think of a good reason for doing so on their own, that attitude always makes them inclined to resist changing their behavior. Lucky for them (and unfortunately for the rest of us), money has always been able to buy influence, of both the popular and the political kind.
Thus, reasoning and progressive people everywhere will always be forced to contend with the unreasoning and conservative influence of money and all of the ridiculous arguments that it causes.
As a sysadmin, in most of the places I've worked, particularly in the larger organizations that have been around for a while, the ages of the employees have been about the same: there are some younger ones, some older ones and a bunch in between. The young ones get paid less, while the old ones tend to have a better idea of how the organization works overall. Therefore, management will try to get rid of, or avoid, the older ones when they can simply because they are more expensive, but not that much more valuable. That's one way to look at it.
There's also another way to look at employees. On the one hand there are the dime-a-dozen types who are always needed for mundane tasks, but who are not good at working independently, solving difficult problems, recovering crashed systems, working in an organized fashion, writing coherent reports, etc. These people never constitute the brains of an organization's IT department. On the other hand there are the relatively rare people who actually do have good brains, are interested in the various technical challenges, solve difficult problems all the time, who write all the detailed reports and can be counted on when disaster strikes no matter when it does.
IMO, older IT people of the first type are much more likely to suffer from age-related discrimination than older IT people of the second type. In my experience, upper management always finds out who the really important people are in the IT department -- the people they know can be counted on to get things running again following a major incident.
The main problem for (prospective) employees of the second type is how to get recognized as such. Indeed, for an employer it's the much same: how to find these people and then how to retain their services.
Fiber optic technology that can deliver 100Mbps and even gigabit speeds over wide area distances has been around for years, so the reason it hasn't reached your doorstep yet isn't because it hasn't been invented yet. What's been standing in the way of progress all this time are the large telecom corporations that exploit all those local loops out there, those last miles of ancient copper that they're always promising to replace with something better, but always find a reason not to. No, as far as they're concerned it's always better to squeeze the last dime possible out of your investment if you can, especially when there's no real competition (something most of us can also thank our local governments for).
Last year I did some work that had to be coordinated with a group of programmers in Pakistan. Naturally they were using SSH to connect to the server they were hired to set up their software on. I can only imagine that companies like that are important for the economy other there. However, if the Pakistani government decides to ban all of its own people from using standard connectivity tools, all of which are encrypted these days for good reason, then they will be shooting their economy in the foot. Next thing we know, it will be impossible for people over there to conduct any more on-line financial transactions. In effect, they will be sending themselves back to the digital Stone Age. Meanwhile, the bad guys will just switch to using different port numbers.
The name of this project is horribly contrived and invented only to result in a certain cool acronym, which it does not! It's easy to see that someone spent some time thinking about the name, but obviously not enough.
Clearly the acronym for "Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets" is CLOD, and possibly CLOuD, but not CLOUD!
Was the lead author as incompetent and unimaginative with the rest of his project? If he conducted his research the same way he arrived at his acronym, it doesn't bode well! Of course, I could check by reading his paper, but since I refuse to pay Nature's subscription fee, I don't feel like giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Thanks, Rob, for what I think can be described as a significant contribution to Internet culture. You may have created /. simply as a way to share stories with your friends, but because those stories were a reflection of the type of person you are, and because your site allowed all of its visitors to interact, you unwittingly ended up creating a place that attracted a whole lot of people who were much like you. Like me. And all the rest of the folks who hang out here. And we all found out that there's way more people like us out there than we used to think! So, although its sad to hear of your departure, I will probably always be able to identify more with this site and its visitors than any other, simply because it will continue to attract the attentions of people like you, hopefully for a long time to come.
Thanks again and all the best,
Jaap Winius
PS -- Sentimental drivel? You bet!
WARNING: what follows is the opinion of someone who has no intention of buying a tablet and has not used a smart phone for over a decade!
It assumes that there is actually more demand out there for tablets, only that the Android tablets just aren't good enough in the eyes of consumers to satisfy that demand. However, it could also be that Google's products are among the best around, but that there just isn't enough demand for tablets in general. I can imagine the latter being closer to the truth, in which case any M$ offer would probably do worse (they're incapable of making anything trendy anyway). After all, tablets are too large and unwieldy to compete with smart phones, while they don't have any killer apps either to set them apart from smart phones on the one hand, and laptops and PCs on the other. So far, tablets just seem to be rather like smart phones, except with bigger screens (the main attraction) and without the phone. They seem to me to be yet another gadget looking for a reason to exist -- as opposed to a novel solution to an actual problem.
In the early 90s, all CPUs were sold without coolers. They could get pretty hot, but that was considered normal. This was followed by a period in which you could buy CPU coolers separately, which made sense, because in those days overheating CPUs would crash and burn instead of shutting themselves down to avoid damage. Those early coolers were small and simple, but as the megahertz race between Intel and AMD began heating things up (in this case literally), the coolers got bigger and more expensive. This created a sizable market of which Intel and AMD decided they wanted a share, so they introduced slightly more expensive "boxed" versions of their products that included their own coolers. Now that these have been standard for years, I guess Intel is trying to get rid of them again in order to cut costs. If AMD follows suit, then I expect history will repeat itself: the 3rd party cooler market will expand, and some years later Intel and AMD will introduce "new" boxed versions of their products.
You say you're tired of Gmail and want to run your own mail server, that you don't mind getting your hands dirty and you call yourself a hobbyist. But, at the same time you maintain that you're not a sysadmin and normally prefer to outsource your mail servers. I hope you know how conflicted that sounds. After all, do you want to run your own mail server, or not?
I would recommend running Debian stable with a mail server based on Exim4 daemon heavy, along with SpamAssassin, Clam anti-virus, Razor and Pyzor to cut down on the spam. Actually, on my system over 90% of the spam -- the really obvious stuff -- gets identified and rejected by a bunch of custom filters (regular expressions) that I whipped up: points are awarded for things like a bad HELO, a bad sender domain or a bad reverse lookup... three strikes and you're out! Anything remotely non-obvious ends up in a spambox in the user's home directory. I've run it in this configuration since October 2010 and it has proved to be a very reliable and low-maintenance system that so far nobody has had any reason to complain about.
As for the mail clients, the remote ones are supported by dovecot servers for IMAP and POP3 (both SSL-only). I also support Horde, which is a web application framework that includes stuff like a calendar, a note pad, an address book and, of course, an email client. In my experience Horde has often been the most difficult piece of this puzzle to support, not because it's difficult to install or maintain, but because it's sometimes difficult to upgrade (part of that may be due to my preference for using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL; I've written my own migration scripts on several occasions). For those who persist and succeed, however, the payoff is that you can build up years worth of addresses, notes and calendar information that you can access from anywhere without having to rely on a third party to support the application.
Finally, all of these systems run on servers that are protected by stateful IPv4 and IPv6 firewalls and that are backed up automatically every night. The most important data, including the Horde database, is also backup up to remote systems. Oh, and all this is naturally built on systems with properly configured DNS stuff, interfaces, Internet connections and reverse lookups.
If this all sounds like too much system administration for you, I'm sorry, but to make it any less complicated would be to sacrifice functionality, security and/or reliability. Why don't more people run systems like this? Too complicated, I guess.
If you had a hybrid -- of the type that uses an internal combustion engine only to run a generator to charge up its battery -- that would also be capable of feeding its power back into the household circuit, then you'd be able to power your house for even longer.
When I first heard of K-Splice, I thought it was cool, but that didn't mean I was going to use it. I've used almost nothing but FOSS for just over a decade now. I've supporting it together with commercial products on a few occasions, but in the end have always felt limited, frustrated, or been let down by those products. Such experiences reminded me why I switched to FOSS in the first place; to stop hurting myself.
The open source community should have recognized K-Splice for what it was on day one -- a Good Thing -- but then immediately started work on a free alternative. Sometimes that doesn't happen because a closed-source alternative is already available, so fewer people are interested in developing a free alternative. That's never good. In this case, K-Splice customers probably thought they were paying a very reasonable price for a wonderful and unique product/service, but if they had known what was good for them, they would also have been spending a little extra on the side to sponsor some developers to produce a free alternative.
Don't get me wrong here: I have nothing per se against Linux developers selling closed source software by the license in order to earn a living. We could definitely use some more of those. The only problem is, there's no good reason to trust them any more than we would trust any other commercial software company: in the end, the interests of their customers always come last.
used it for years, but migrated away.
What are you using now instead?
prone to corruption, ...
Well, I've only been using OpenAFS for a year, but so far it has treated me okay. Once, after a power outage, a number of volumes stopped replicating. I ended up having to salvage those and a number of user volumes, but no data was lost and no one seems to have noticed that anything was amiss.
... and not totally compatible with all softwares because it doesn't support all low-level io functions.
Yes, I've noticed that as a result some applications have insisted on saving things in my /home/ directory instead. For a while, GoogleEarth was one of those apps, but not anymore. Other apps are just coded badly, using /home/ instead of $HOME. So far I've had no trouble avoiding such applications (my office runs an Xfce environment).
The client kernel modules are also a headache...
Something I've had absolutely no problems with.
... and the Windoze one is unreliable.
That I can imagine. But, it's probably not easy to write network client software for an OS that has an an uneven playing field. My site has only two Windows workstations and the database apps running on them regularly have trouble saving their data to the network. I thought it was a problem with the AFS client, but no. The developer of that Windows app recently told us that it was a general problem that he just can't solve; he says that M$ is the problem and it doesn't matter which network client is used.
I think the idea is great, and it has some cool features, but now with other volume-management tools it is not a front-runner.
So, what are you using now instead of AFS?
I have spoken to people who are using M$ file servers with DFS, and they seems to be quite happy. But, I also know that 1.) their boss/client has had to shell out a lot of dough for that and 2.) they have to put up with a whole mess of Windows-related headaches that I simply don't have to deal with.
I used to dream of setting up an office network environment based on Linux and FOSS. Only, there there was one thing missing: a proper file system. That's why I think OpenAFS -- the distributed file system -- deserves more attention.
Most *nix fans use either NFS, which is simple, but scales badly and lacks encryption, or Samba, which was designed to support Windows clients. OpenAFS, on the other hand, offers file sharing and replicated read-only content distribution, provides location independence, scalability, security, and transparent migration capabilities. Client software includes support for UNIX, Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. The code base is very stable and it has an active development and support community.
As far as I'm concerned, Firefox could also use a DiskShrink team, although perhaps DiskPerformance would be more accurate. My site uses OpenAFS across several locations with 6Mbps to tie them together. The workstations run Debian squeeze with Xfce. It all works fine, but in the beginning we soon discovered that Firefox wasn't going to cut it. Although it was our preferred browser, even with its cache disabled it was too slow when the user volume, which contains the home directory, was not on the local file server. We ended up switching to Google Chrome, which is much faster in this respect.
For a website owner working together with a hosting provider that still has plenty of IPv4 addresses, why would you even want to move to IPv6-only? Especially when so many in the world aren't even running dual-stack? The only good reason that I've heard so far to set up an IPv6-only website is for testing purposes (You can't see this site unless you have IPv6!).
On the other hand, soon there will be plenty of people and organizations in the world, starting in Asia, that will be IPv6-only. Not because it's better, but because they won't have any choice! For those people, whether it will be useful or not to run IPv6-only will be entirely beside the point.
As for us here in the West, where our pools of free IPv4 addresses are not yet being rationed, that doesn't make it important for us to start running IPv6-only... it makes it important for us to start running dual-stack! Not just for the sake of the Asia-Pacific folks, but for ours too. The chances are good that one day you'll want to access something over there that happens only to have an IPv6 address.
One question that anyone in the world could ask is whether it is useful to run dual-stack -- even if you don't have to. In my experience, most definitely. True, it does require a bit of extra work that must be done properly, but afterwards the main advantage for me has been that, with no NATs that must be traversed, remote management is much easier than before.
The reason why Gates was so successful was not because he was an innovator, but because of countless acquisitions and the fact that he was able to get away with his unethical business practices for so long. It's how M$ gained its desktop monopoly. Which has since been eroding, not only because of the rise of Linux, Google, and Apple, but also because justice departments around the world have become more aware of how IT monopolies work, especially M$. Therefore, Gates can't come back and do it again with anything resembling the success that he had the first time around.
In the Netherlands, this has also been an issue for some time for exactly the same reasons. However, the lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry, the farming industry and one very large veterinary firm that sells the antibiotics directly to the farmers (giving them as much as they want and making way too much money in the process) seem to have far too much influence in the Hague, which is the seat of the Dutch government. With these rather influential veterinarians arguing that any restrictions placed upon them would be unfair and against EU trade rules, the government is now considering banning all veterinarians from selling their own drugs, forcing their clients to buy directly from normal pharmacies instead. That would be unfortunate, because these pharmacies only have experience with human medicine. Thus there would be the risk of the pharmacies giving or offering (cheaper) alternatives that may not work for dogs, cats, cows, sheep, etc. (apparently, there are plenty of examples of this). This is one of the reasons why vets are also trained as, and usually operate as pharmacists.
Too late. That just means that the Bill Gates Borg icon is becoming part of Slashdot lore. Newbies may not understand immediately, but they will if they stick around long enough. Besides, if we didn't allow for this sort of thing, how could we ever expect to develop our own culture? If instead Slashdot just followed whatever was trendy, then I think our days would be numbered. Of course, this may also mean that we will eventually die out, our sizable membership finally dwindling to a small number of old kooks, but even then I'd rather be a member of this club than of one of the trendier ones that come and go.
I find this kind of talk depressing. All you seem to care about is whether you any your buddies (America) are ahead or not. Why not just be happy that human spaceflight is advancing? Must you be reminded that the ISS is an international endeavor? Spaceflight is something that we should all be doing together. That way we can achieve far more than any one country can on its own.
KPN is a typical old-school telecom monopolist that, over the last two decades, has had to watch its market share and profits shrink. A few years ago their DSL network suffered a terrible outage that lasted for several weeks. The problem was their old ATM network equipment that just couldn't cope with the scale at which it was being used. Back in the end of the 90s, they had been warned by network experts that ATM was would eventually do this to them, but they didn't care. It was more important that it was cheap, and, and one KPN exec is rumored to have put it, "We zijn toch dominant" (We're dominant anyway). Since that's been their attitude towards consumers for, like, forever, so it doesn't surprise me that that they're also busy blazing new trails with DPI. Of course they want to use it to protect their investments, or else why tell investors about it?
If you do you'll always end up with FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) solutions and love your job. Either that or you'll end up with too much stuff that doesn't work and you'll hate your job.
That's the problem with this line of work. More than anything, sysadmins love stuff that works and it's often the grubby little details that make all the difference. However, it usually doesn't work out this way for them. If you're serious about your job, it won't take long before you to realize two important things about the world you live in:
* Commercial software companies just want your money
Unfortunately, it's not just about selling licenses (if only that were true): it's also about limiting the customers in what they can do with the products after they buy them. For instance, they typically use proprietary file formats, databases and protocols so that their products do not work with those of anyone else except their own, or those of their choosing. They call this "being competitive", but it's simply about limiting your choices so that they can steer you (the consumer) in whatever direction they want. They don't care about helping you to get everything to work they way you'd like, so functionality is severely limited. Basically, these companies just want your money, and preferably as much of it as they can get.
* FOSS developers just want things to work
These are the people who are on your side. They're just like you: they dream of systems that do everything you want and of users who are happy. Your system should be like that box of Lego blocks that you played with when you were a kid: everything fits together, even if now things are much more complex. This is accomplished by using open standards for file formats, databases and communications, as well as by providing the source code for the software.
What this means is that your success and happiness will depend on how much you can limit the use of commercial software in your network environment. Unfortunately, the average user (including your boss) has zero understanding of these concepts. Instead, their choices are much more likely to be influenced by a complex combination psychological factors, such as the marketing efforts of the big commercial software companies, their own limited experience, the advice of their favorite vendors and sales representatives, their desire to avoid learning to work with anything new, and even what their friends think they should do. In other words, unless they really respect you, your advice will not be taken seriously. Instead, they will likely tell you what software to work with and your efforts will ultimately be frustrating, the results disappointing. However, if you're lucky and good at explaining, maybe your boss won't blame you too much for the results.
The space shuttle was always too expensive, satellites are almost always better and cheaper than the SR-71, and high-speed passenger services were basically only useful for the very wealthy.
Here's a better way to look at the distance to Proxima Centauri: if the Milky Way galaxy is scaled down so that the distance from the Earth to the Sun (usually about 150 million km) is reduced to only 1 mm, then Pluto would be 4 cm from the Sun, but our nearest stellar neighbor would still be 267 m away. Oh, and the Oort Cloud would (theoretically) be 10 m in radius, the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy would be 6,327 km and the Andromeda galaxy would be 139,200 km from us.
IMO, in the best possible case it may be possible for our descendants to colonize most of our own solar system. However, considering the vast distances involved, I view it as unlikely that we will ever attempt interstellar travel... at least not on a regular basis and barring the invention of some revolutionary propulsion technology, such as a "warp engine".
What's more, even if we ever were to develop the capability of accelerating a large enough ship up to a significant fraction of the speed of light within a relatively short span of time, then we would still be faced with the problem of abrasion due to interstellar gas and dust. At those speeds, every speck of dust hitting the front of such a space ship would inflict an inordinate amount of damage. Therefore, another one of Gene Roddenberry's inventions would be needed: the deflector dish.
Face it: this universe just wasn't made for tourism.
Then the Americans would probably have made it to Mars before 1980. And then never bothered to go back again.
Assuming that you found yourself sucked out of the cabin intact, perhaps low oxygen would not have to be a problem. It certainly would be if you were stationary at that altitude, but in this case you're falling. The question is, if you were falling face down in a free-fall position (belly to Earth), would the force of the air entering your mouth at terminal velocity (at least 195 km/h) increase the pressure of the air in your lungs enough to compensate for the altitude?
Remember, it's not the fraction of oxygen that decreases with increasing altitude -- that stays the same at 20%. It's the partial pressure of oxygen (PPO2) that decreases linearly with the ambient pressure. IIRC, we humans require a PPO2 of 0.12 bar to remain conscious, which is what you have at something like 12,000 feet (see this conversion table). At 30,000 ft the ambient pressure is only about 0.3 bar, so the speed of your descent would have to at least double the pressure in your lungs to compensate, which seems possible to me.