Off topic, but your sig says you should never by a WD Black drive. I read your post, and was unable to comment because it's an older post--so I thought I'd give you a quick reply here.
You said:
it's even worse when you've got to PAY to send it back and wait 2 weeks for the whole process to be done and your credit settled, etc.)
Use a bank-supplied Visa or MasterCard for all your online purchases. I had some retarded company ship me 3 refurbed WD drives. 2 showed up completely dead. They said I had to pay to ship it back. We got into a long (3-day) email argument over me refusing to pay for their mistakes. (I am not responsible, and should have to pay to ship/fix the two dead drives that arrived.)
Long story short, I called Bank of America, told them my tale of woe, and they immediately reversed the charge.
I then emailed the company back and told them they could either pay for return shipping, or I would be holding on to my 1 working drive and 2 dead drives that they gave me for free.
I had a shipping label in 30 minutes and they fixed my drives. I called the bank, and they settled everything.
Just make sure it's a BANK card. PayPal doesn't count. If you read the fine print, you'll notice PayPal won't cover you unless it's an eBay purchase. They will simply tell you that since you ordered a drive, and a drive showed up, they aren't doing anything--even if the drive is dead. They only cover things like empty boxes showing up.
If it's between Windows servers, you can try DFS (although I haven't seen it really do one-way replication) or just use robocopy.
We use both to replicate data between windows servers internally and on external sites.
I use it to replicate some data between sites, and a few one-way copies for backups, but it's a horrid system. No easy way to see what's going on or control the progress. I can tweak rsync into next tuesday and figure out what's going on like nothing else, but windows DFS and DFSR (or whatever they call the new stuff in R2) is buggy and difficult to troubleshoot or fix.
Please, think of the PFYs. His DR fileset is only 4Gigs. My pr0n is bigger than that. ASCII/text pr0n!
Others have already given him the best solution for his case - DVDs. Overnight them, and he is done. Latency may be a bit much, but not that much more than doing it over DSL or dialup.
Now, lets go back to discussing OT stuff.
I don't know about you--but I don't trust my DVDs in the hands of UPS, FedEx, or the USPS. Especially if they have customer data or credit cards. Yeah, I know--encrypt. And if there's a problem decrypting the data in the DVD? Ship another DVD? The latency is outrageous. It could take weeks to get a successful backup, encryption, shipment, decryption, and verification. The network is faster.
4GB of files once per month, why bother using the network?
No one ever seems to answer the question. The dude has his reasons.
I find myself in a similar situation. 7 offices connected via Comcast cable. Every single office has a local backup to a USB-attached external hard drive. But they also want off-site backups in case of fire or flood. Making a rount-trip between the 7 offices takes half a day. None of the staff at the offices are technically competent. They used to do tape-backups at each office, but people would forget, tapes would go back, staff didn't know how to check/verify backups, etc... They want an automated system that doesn't require their staff to do anything. Take the human failure component out.
It's easy enough to script a local backup using a.vbs file and ntbackup, but it's difficult to replicate all those remote offices back to the main office. It overloads the connection.
I've considered and played copying the ntbackup file off-site every night, but the bks files are anywhere from 2 GB to 50 GB. I've tried BackupPC and a few other apps that run well on Linux, but they don't run so well when accessing Windows boxes.
It would be great to be able to script a copy of the data to a backup directory, create a.torrent file, and then drop the.torrent file into a directory on the servers that needed to download and store the torrent.
Do you really want to maximise the probability that they'll all have the same design or manufacturing defect and will all fail closely spaced in time? I'd go for different makes and models.
I'm not talking about using Hitachi drives...;)
But seriously, I never trust drives purchased in bulk for being part of a backup system or RAID set. If 10 drives all came off the assembly line one after another, there's a good chance some proximal event in time affected all 10. For all I know, someone sneezed when the drives rolled by, and every single one has a snot dropplet that's messing with the read/write heads. I don't want them to all fail within hours, days, or even weeks of each other.
(I know that's a very over-simplified way of looking at HD manufacturing.)
Now put them into the bays every month, and let a tool completely read and write the data on the 3 disks again, thereby letting the error correction do its job. This prevents the motor from sticking and the data from bit-rot.
What kind of tool are you using for refreshing the data on the disk? I'm not aware of anything other than SMART in linux that will perform non-destructive read/write tests--but I'm personally know knowledgeable enough to know if SMART is actually reading and writing the actual data and potentially correcting problems...
If you absolutely must store your data on-site or can't afford off-site backups, consider something like this hard drive safe from thinkgeek.
Either that, or make arrangements with a good friend to purchase 4 identical hard drives.
He holds on to one of your drives, you put one in your backup server.
You hold on to one of his drives, he puts on in his backup server.
Every week, go visit your friend and take the drive from your backup server. Give it to him for storage at his house, and you do the same for him.
After the switch, you can both run off the second set of drives until next week when you meet and swap drives again.
It's a good idea, because you have an on-site backup, and an off-site backup at your friends house--plus it forces me^H^Hyou out of the basement to go have human contact every once in a while.
The down-side is if you store your data unencrypted, your friend has access to all your porn.
Good idea--plus if you 'encrypt' it in some old, dead language, you can have the scientists of the world recover your data like they did with the Rosetta Stone. I suggest backing up in French.
I'm doing this but just with Cisco routers at each of the remote branches, and using the 'wakeonlan' (debian package name) app to send wakeup packets. You'll need to enable directed broadcasts on the routers for that to work, but you should be able to find (or write) a similar tool for Windows.
Crap. Some higher-up decided to use Sonicwall products which are utterly incapable of doing anything...they don't even have WoL support in them. Pretty stupid for a 'low-level' network management device.
That's why you use WoL to boot the system one hour before employees arrive, do a virus scan, check for updates, or other maintenance tasks.
1 hour is generally enough time for updates and virus scan. Employees come into a machine ready to go, you get regular maintenance and everybody's happy.
What do you use for WoL? One of my clients is stuck in a windows-only environment with 7 sites connected by VPNs. I can't seem to find a nice integrated utility to wake all my machines. I either have to script something or connect out to the server for each location and trigger the WoL manually.
The Comprehensive Environmental Evaluations for IceCube are available online for free. If you feel that there is something in there that requires attention or if there is something there that people have previously objected to in the case of oil rigs then you really should mention that.
Ok--you called my bluff. I really don't feel like wasting my time reading through a 10 MB PDF. Especially if it's from the NSF. Another dumb government agency that has everything to benefit from saying there are science-type problems which need more study--like oil drilling, global warming, etc... They are not an unbiased agency.
If you read the full CEE there, you should be able to know why. I suggest you read section 5.3 alone, if the whole document is daunting, since that describes the environmental effects and that section is followed by a description of procedures taken to mitigate those.
I started reading section 5.2. I gained consciousness a few moments ago at the end of the first paragraph. I won't argue that this has more or less of an impact than an oil rig. That was never my argument.
I've had this discussion so many times I've come to the conclusion that some people just can't be convinced.
The reason I think drilling for oil is dumb is because it's an old technology (burning stuff to get the energy out), we really need to move beyond it.
Man, that argument takes the cake.
You think drilling for oil is dumb because it's an old technology. The first oil well is debated as being sometime around 1820.
Maybe you also think using a telephone is dumb? Telephone's came about around 1875.
How about airplanes? 1853. Are they stupid too?
Sorry--you've lost me. With a dumb statement and logic like that, I can't even bring myself to read the rest of your post--I'd have to punch myself in the face several times just to stay conscious.
I'm not saying oil companies earning money is wrong. I'm saying that I don't really care if THEY benefit from the oil. I care if society benefits, and if I benefit.
That sounds like a great plan. How do I sign up for not lifting a finger all the while benefiting from another human being's labor? (Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but that's how your statement comes across to me...)
So I have to ask, is the change in oil price that the consumer sees (e.g., in gas prices) worth the drawbacks of the activity? I'm sure if I was an oil executive whose salary depends on oil profits, my cost-benefit analysis would run rather differently.
Of course it would differ. An oil company executive (regardless of what he negotiated as a paycheck) is there to support the share holders. Part of my retirement fund invests in 'big oil'. So of course I want them to make a profit. On the other hand, I don't want it to be too much--because then someone will realize it's waay to expensive and come up with a cheaper fuel source, and the oil company loses money, the stock drops, etc...
That disagrees with the studies I've read (e.g., from the DOE), which indicate a decade or so before you see serious market penetration,
Who are you going to trust--a bunch of government bureaucrats or the people who actually do the work daily? I think the DOE is complete out of touch--like most government agencies.
and the effect on the global price of oil won't amount to much more than tens of cents on a gallon of gas at best lasting maybe 20 years. Maybe more than that right at first, since there's usually a jump due to speculation, then less than that, and perhaps a rise again at the end as it runs out.
I'm not an economist, so I not in any way qualified to comment on how it will effect the fuel prices--but it would appear that a majority of the United States saying "shut up and drill!" caused the Saudis to get their act together and lower prices. That--and the president letting the executive ban on off-shore drilling expire.
It's like I said in my previous paragraph--if someone is making an obscene profit, people are going to look elsewhere. No one wants to get ripped off. Well, the Saudis jacked the price of oil up so much that the U.S. was starting to give serious consideration of allowing off-shore drilling, drilling in the ANWR, etc... And the Saudis were faced with either making a smaller profit, or making no profit from us at all.
The oil companies are not hurting for oil right now; they're already sitting on substantial reserves. I'm sure oil companies could rush some of that oil to market to claim that it's making a difference to supply and prices, but the time until it actually makes a difference is maybe rather longer. Also, since it is a global market, it could be the case that OPEC will just release some of their reserves and neutralize the price drop.
If the global market could have simply released some of their reserves, why didn't they do that during the last year when gas was passing $3.40 a gallon in my area? It doesn't work both ways.
Plus, there's no reason for the U.S. to be tied to the global market. We don't have to be subject to the whim of middle-eastern countries setting oil prices. Of course that would mean we're subject to U.S. 'big oil' prices. And while you may argue that U.S. 'big oil' would be no better than the Saudi, well, someone can always find a cheaper, better way--or an alternative. That's the beauty of the free market.
Well, it's nice for my wallet, but I personally would like them to be higher, because I think we need to be reducing fossil fuel consumption, and a price signal is the best way to induce demand destruction. We already saw some of that happen with the recent gas crunch. I'm willing to pay a risk premium.
It's a shame Microsoft is refusing to learn. If Windows would only copy the good bits of Linux, while retaining the excellent software support which is the main reason people use it, it could be the best OS around, instead of merely the most widespread.
Excellent software support? Have you ever tried calling Microsoft support? Terrible. And Illegible.
And yeah--I know you were really talking about the number of applications available for the platform.
Drilling in ANWR would make money for oil companies, but the consumer isn't going to see any of that oil within the next decade or two
First off, you make it sound like oil companies earning money is wrong. I don't know about you, but when I start a business, I expect to make money. No one starts a business to lose money.
Second, Shell is saying the time from start to pumping oil would be less than 6 months. That oil would be on the market in less than a year.
There are very few truly unspoiled wildlife refuges left in the U.S. Is it worth it to develop part of one for limited benefits? That's unclear to me. Of course, the drilling doesn't affect the whole area, but it's yet another encroachment on one of the few remaining protected areas
That's true. Personally, I'm all against the federal government setting aside any land for any purpose that isn't in the constitution. Now if the states set it aside, I'd be more comfortable with it. But regardless, I don't want to just bulldoze the grand canyon flat, or level the ANWR either.
Of course, drilling does provide more oil and lower prices, but in the grand scheme not much.
I'm just glad the prices are back down. During the peak, it was costing me about $45/week to fill up my car. Now I'm back down to what it cost about 10 years ago $21 a week. I think simply the threat of us drilling scared the Saudi markets into lowering their prices.
Um, so oil rigs are 0.2 kilometers long and have no width?
I have no clue how big oil rigs are--but I'm betting they aren't 1 sq. kilometer. And about 10 seconds after I posted that, I realized my mistake--for some stupid reason, I was thinking the telescope measurements were cubed, not squared. Totally retarded.
Also, if somehow it exploded all we'd get are shards of ice and pools of water not gigantic oil spills...
I don't think you should drive a car. If it suddenly exploded while you were driving, it could impact local wildlife...
The point I'm trying to make is this--do you know how many oil rigs 'suddenly explode'? And the argument that we shouldn't construct one because it *might* have a problem someday is pretty lame.
I'm not saying you're wrong*, just that your arguments are.
*though, incidentally, you are.
I'll totally admit I screwed up my size argument--but as for my original argument that a telescope and an oil rig are both going to impact the environment, yet the environmentalists aren't bitching about a telescope--well, feel free to prove me wrong instead of just making foot notes*
*because arguments are resolved by showing facts, not by snide footnotes.
Environmentalists don't really complain about the idea of building one oil rig. Of those who are against, say, ANWR drilling, they mostly complain about building many oil rigs, and all the road and pipeline infrastructure needed to support them. Also, there isn't really any wildlife at the South Pole, other than assorted gnats.
The size of land they are talking about using in the ANWR has been compared to a postage stamp on a football field.
No matter what we do, wherever we do it, there will be an impact to the environment, or some species. But we can't stop everything we do because it will effect a frog, or herd of caribou or whatever. On the other hand, we can't be totally irresponsible either.
I bet in 2015 environmentalists will blame global warming for the extintion of the last ice telescope in the wild.
My first thought when reading the story is "Where the f*ck are all the environmentalists?"
It's apparently ok to screw around with a cubic kilometer of ice and wildlife for a telescope, but it's not ok to take up 0.2 kilometers for an oil rig...and notice I didn't say 'square'.
Well, sorta, if your definition of the beginning of time is 1995 or thereabouts;) Before then, we had Write and its unhidable EOF character... This almost makes me want to fire up Windows 3.1 on some old machine and see if Write supported non-DOS line-endings like WordPad does.
</nitpicking>
--- Mr. DOS
That's the year I got my first IT job, so for me it's kinda like the sacred Unix Epoch. Nothing existed before it.
Oh please. Wordpad is like Notepad, only it can't make up its mind whether to be richtext or plaintext and it doesn't open files when you drop them into it.
Don't drop the files into the 'document area', drop them onto the 'menu bar' area and they'll open.
I f*cking hate wordpad, but it's the only thing that recognizes and saves unix line-endings and is installed on every windows box since the beginning of time.
Yeah, it would. But what would make me want to filter by a specific IP address in the first place? We had a/19, and several/24s. Why would I pick your IP out of the 9,000 other IPs in our network, or the who-knows-how-many IPs requesting information from outside our network?
You probably wouldn't want to, but you'd have to do what the NSA guys told you. And why would they want to sniff on my IP? Dunno, maybe just because my name is Middle Eastern (it's not, but let's assume that it was, for the sake of argument)?
True. I'd love to see it encrypted and anonymous, specifically for reasons like that. But your average ISP isn't interested in sifting through all your DNS traffic like that...
But as soon as you filter those 7 million by his IP (assuming that it's known; or by some other known tag), wouldn't the result be much more manageable?
Yeah, it would. But what would make me want to filter by a specific IP address in the first place? We had a/19, and several/24s. Why would I pick your IP out of the 9,000 other IPs in our network, or the who-knows-how-many IPs requesting information from outside our network?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all about privacy. That sort of information should be totally private--enforcably private (like encrypted) just like phone calls and associated records.
Why would the NSA decide to listen into my phone call. It will be one among millions or maybe even billions today.
I care about keeping DNS requests private. I personal would prefer that my ISP can't tell where I'm browsing just by grabbing clear-text domain names out of DNS queries.
Never worked for an ISP, huh?
I worked for a (small?) one about 8 years ago. 8 years ago we had on average 1,000 users connected, and also hosted several thousand domains, and had 30,000 mailboxes on our server.
In an average day, we handled around 70 DNS requests per second on our primary server and about 10 requests per second on our secondary. (Using Microsoft's crappy DNS server no less)
So tell me why I should bother sorting through roughly seven million DNS requests per day to see where you've been surfing?
It's in the same vein as "Do you read my email?". On a server with 30,000 mailboxes, and who knows how many messages coming in per-second, the answer is "f*ck no". The volume of mail is too great.
Of course what your average BOFH might admin over a few beers is that the only time we ever monitor something like mailboxes or DNS requests is when something brings them to our attention...like a user asking if we're monitoring their activities. "No, should we be?"
But DNSSEC uses all pre-computed signatures for the zone data. So if you can break the RSA key, you can create fake signatures ahead of time and serve bogus DNS data. Your botnet has got all the time in the world to try to break that key...
Bah! I prefer to hand-rotate the key in each zone file every 15 minutes. I don't sleep much^H^H^H^Hever.
Slashdot Mirror
You said:
it's even worse when you've got to PAY to send it back and wait 2 weeks for the whole process to be done and your credit settled, etc.)
Use a bank-supplied Visa or MasterCard for all your online purchases. I had some retarded company ship me 3 refurbed WD drives. 2 showed up completely dead. They said I had to pay to ship it back. We got into a long (3-day) email argument over me refusing to pay for their mistakes. (I am not responsible, and should have to pay to ship/fix the two dead drives that arrived.)
Long story short, I called Bank of America, told them my tale of woe, and they immediately reversed the charge.
I then emailed the company back and told them they could either pay for return shipping, or I would be holding on to my 1 working drive and 2 dead drives that they gave me for free.
I had a shipping label in 30 minutes and they fixed my drives. I called the bank, and they settled everything.
Just make sure it's a BANK card. PayPal doesn't count. If you read the fine print, you'll notice PayPal won't cover you unless it's an eBay purchase. They will simply tell you that since you ordered a drive, and a drive showed up, they aren't doing anything--even if the drive is dead. They only cover things like empty boxes showing up.
If it's between Windows servers, you can try DFS (although I haven't seen it really do one-way replication) or just use robocopy. We use both to replicate data between windows servers internally and on external sites.
I use it to replicate some data between sites, and a few one-way copies for backups, but it's a horrid system. No easy way to see what's going on or control the progress. I can tweak rsync into next tuesday and figure out what's going on like nothing else, but windows DFS and DFSR (or whatever they call the new stuff in R2) is buggy and difficult to troubleshoot or fix.
Please, think of the PFYs. His DR fileset is only 4Gigs. My pr0n is bigger than that. ASCII/text pr0n!
Others have already given him the best solution for his case - DVDs. Overnight them, and he is done. Latency may be a bit much, but not that much more than doing it over DSL or dialup.
Now, lets go back to discussing OT stuff.
I don't know about you--but I don't trust my DVDs in the hands of UPS, FedEx, or the USPS. Especially if they have customer data or credit cards. Yeah, I know--encrypt. And if there's a problem decrypting the data in the DVD? Ship another DVD? The latency is outrageous. It could take weeks to get a successful backup, encryption, shipment, decryption, and verification. The network is faster.
4GB of files once per month, why bother using the network?
No one ever seems to answer the question. The dude has his reasons.
.vbs file and ntbackup, but it's difficult to replicate all those remote offices back to the main office. It overloads the connection.
.torrent file, and then drop the .torrent file into a directory on the servers that needed to download and store the torrent.
I find myself in a similar situation. 7 offices connected via Comcast cable. Every single office has a local backup to a USB-attached external hard drive. But they also want off-site backups in case of fire or flood. Making a rount-trip between the 7 offices takes half a day. None of the staff at the offices are technically competent. They used to do tape-backups at each office, but people would forget, tapes would go back, staff didn't know how to check/verify backups, etc... They want an automated system that doesn't require their staff to do anything. Take the human failure component out.
It's easy enough to script a local backup using a
I've considered and played copying the ntbackup file off-site every night, but the bks files are anywhere from 2 GB to 50 GB. I've tried BackupPC and a few other apps that run well on Linux, but they don't run so well when accessing Windows boxes.
It would be great to be able to script a copy of the data to a backup directory, create a
Do you really want to maximise the probability that they'll all have the same design or manufacturing defect and will all fail closely spaced in time? I'd go for different makes and models.
I'm not talking about using Hitachi drives... ;)
But seriously, I never trust drives purchased in bulk for being part of a backup system or RAID set. If 10 drives all came off the assembly line one after another, there's a good chance some proximal event in time affected all 10. For all I know, someone sneezed when the drives rolled by, and every single one has a snot dropplet that's messing with the read/write heads. I don't want them to all fail within hours, days, or even weeks of each other.
(I know that's a very over-simplified way of looking at HD manufacturing.)
Now put them into the bays every month, and let a tool completely read and write the data on the 3 disks again, thereby letting the error correction do its job. This prevents the motor from sticking and the data from bit-rot.
What kind of tool are you using for refreshing the data on the disk? I'm not aware of anything other than SMART in linux that will perform non-destructive read/write tests--but I'm personally know knowledgeable enough to know if SMART is actually reading and writing the actual data and potentially correcting problems...
If you absolutely must store your data on-site or can't afford off-site backups, consider something like this hard drive safe from thinkgeek.
Either that, or make arrangements with a good friend to purchase 4 identical hard drives.
He holds on to one of your drives, you put one in your backup server.
You hold on to one of his drives, he puts on in his backup server.
Every week, go visit your friend and take the drive from your backup server. Give it to him for storage at his house, and you do the same for him.
After the switch, you can both run off the second set of drives until next week when you meet and swap drives again.
It's a good idea, because you have an on-site backup, and an off-site backup at your friends house--plus it forces me^H^Hyou out of the basement to go have human contact every once in a while.
The down-side is if you store your data unencrypted, your friend has access to all your porn.
ClayTablet
Good idea--plus if you 'encrypt' it in some old, dead language, you can have the scientists of the world recover your data like they did with the Rosetta Stone. I suggest backing up in French.
I'm doing this but just with Cisco routers at each of the remote branches, and using the 'wakeonlan' (debian package name) app to send wakeup packets. You'll need to enable directed broadcasts on the routers for that to work, but you should be able to find (or write) a similar tool for Windows.
Crap. Some higher-up decided to use Sonicwall products which are utterly incapable of doing anything...they don't even have WoL support in them. Pretty stupid for a 'low-level' network management device.
That's why you use WoL to boot the system one hour before employees arrive, do a virus scan, check for updates, or other maintenance tasks. 1 hour is generally enough time for updates and virus scan. Employees come into a machine ready to go, you get regular maintenance and everybody's happy.
What do you use for WoL? One of my clients is stuck in a windows-only environment with 7 sites connected by VPNs. I can't seem to find a nice integrated utility to wake all my machines. I either have to script something or connect out to the server for each location and trigger the WoL manually.
I fucking love you.
I'm really hoping Anonymous Coward is a girl, otherwise this thread just made me a bit nervous...
The Comprehensive Environmental Evaluations for IceCube are available online for free. If you feel that there is something in there that requires attention or if there is something there that people have previously objected to in the case of oil rigs then you really should mention that.
Ok--you called my bluff. I really don't feel like wasting my time reading through a 10 MB PDF. Especially if it's from the NSF. Another dumb government agency that has everything to benefit from saying there are science-type problems which need more study--like oil drilling, global warming, etc... They are not an unbiased agency.
If you read the full CEE there, you should be able to know why. I suggest you read section 5.3 alone, if the whole document is daunting, since that describes the environmental effects and that section is followed by a description of procedures taken to mitigate those.
I started reading section 5.2. I gained consciousness a few moments ago at the end of the first paragraph. I won't argue that this has more or less of an impact than an oil rig. That was never my argument.
I've had this discussion so many times I've come to the conclusion that some people just can't be convinced.
The reason I think drilling for oil is dumb is because it's an old technology (burning stuff to get the energy out), we really need to move beyond it.
Man, that argument takes the cake.
You think drilling for oil is dumb because it's an old technology. The first oil well is debated as being sometime around 1820.
Maybe you also think using a telephone is dumb? Telephone's came about around 1875.
How about airplanes? 1853. Are they stupid too?
Sorry--you've lost me. With a dumb statement and logic like that, I can't even bring myself to read the rest of your post--I'd have to punch myself in the face several times just to stay conscious.
I'm not saying oil companies earning money is wrong. I'm saying that I don't really care if THEY benefit from the oil. I care if society benefits, and if I benefit.
That sounds like a great plan. How do I sign up for not lifting a finger all the while benefiting from another human being's labor? (Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but that's how your statement comes across to me...)
So I have to ask, is the change in oil price that the consumer sees (e.g., in gas prices) worth the drawbacks of the activity? I'm sure if I was an oil executive whose salary depends on oil profits, my cost-benefit analysis would run rather differently.
Of course it would differ. An oil company executive (regardless of what he negotiated as a paycheck) is there to support the share holders. Part of my retirement fund invests in 'big oil'. So of course I want them to make a profit. On the other hand, I don't want it to be too much--because then someone will realize it's waay to expensive and come up with a cheaper fuel source, and the oil company loses money, the stock drops, etc...
That disagrees with the studies I've read (e.g., from the DOE), which indicate a decade or so before you see serious market penetration,
Who are you going to trust--a bunch of government bureaucrats or the people who actually do the work daily? I think the DOE is complete out of touch--like most government agencies.
and the effect on the global price of oil won't amount to much more than tens of cents on a gallon of gas at best lasting maybe 20 years. Maybe more than that right at first, since there's usually a jump due to speculation, then less than that, and perhaps a rise again at the end as it runs out.
I'm not an economist, so I not in any way qualified to comment on how it will effect the fuel prices--but it would appear that a majority of the United States saying "shut up and drill!" caused the Saudis to get their act together and lower prices. That--and the president letting the executive ban on off-shore drilling expire.
It's like I said in my previous paragraph--if someone is making an obscene profit, people are going to look elsewhere. No one wants to get ripped off. Well, the Saudis jacked the price of oil up so much that the U.S. was starting to give serious consideration of allowing off-shore drilling, drilling in the ANWR, etc... And the Saudis were faced with either making a smaller profit, or making no profit from us at all.
The oil companies are not hurting for oil right now; they're already sitting on substantial reserves. I'm sure oil companies could rush some of that oil to market to claim that it's making a difference to supply and prices, but the time until it actually makes a difference is maybe rather longer. Also, since it is a global market, it could be the case that OPEC will just release some of their reserves and neutralize the price drop.
If the global market could have simply released some of their reserves, why didn't they do that during the last year when gas was passing $3.40 a gallon in my area? It doesn't work both ways.
Plus, there's no reason for the U.S. to be tied to the global market. We don't have to be subject to the whim of middle-eastern countries setting oil prices. Of course that would mean we're subject to U.S. 'big oil' prices. And while you may argue that U.S. 'big oil' would be no better than the Saudi, well, someone can always find a cheaper, better way--or an alternative. That's the beauty of the free market.
Well, it's nice for my wallet, but I personally would like them to be higher, because I think we need to be reducing fossil fuel consumption, and a price signal is the best way to induce demand destruction. We already saw some of that happen with the recent gas crunch. I'm willing to pay a risk premium.
The reason we
It's a shame Microsoft is refusing to learn. If Windows would only copy the good bits of Linux, while retaining the excellent software support which is the main reason people use it, it could be the best OS around, instead of merely the most widespread.
Excellent software support? Have you ever tried calling Microsoft support? Terrible. And Illegible.
And yeah--I know you were really talking about the number of applications available for the platform.
Drilling in ANWR would make money for oil companies, but the consumer isn't going to see any of that oil within the next decade or two
First off, you make it sound like oil companies earning money is wrong. I don't know about you, but when I start a business, I expect to make money. No one starts a business to lose money.
Second, Shell is saying the time from start to pumping oil would be less than 6 months. That oil would be on the market in less than a year.
There are very few truly unspoiled wildlife refuges left in the U.S. Is it worth it to develop part of one for limited benefits? That's unclear to me. Of course, the drilling doesn't affect the whole area, but it's yet another encroachment on one of the few remaining protected areas
That's true. Personally, I'm all against the federal government setting aside any land for any purpose that isn't in the constitution. Now if the states set it aside, I'd be more comfortable with it. But regardless, I don't want to just bulldoze the grand canyon flat, or level the ANWR either.
Of course, drilling does provide more oil and lower prices, but in the grand scheme not much.
I'm just glad the prices are back down. During the peak, it was costing me about $45/week to fill up my car. Now I'm back down to what it cost about 10 years ago $21 a week. I think simply the threat of us drilling scared the Saudi markets into lowering their prices.
Um, so oil rigs are 0.2 kilometers long and have no width?
I have no clue how big oil rigs are--but I'm betting they aren't 1 sq. kilometer. And about 10 seconds after I posted that, I realized my mistake--for some stupid reason, I was thinking the telescope measurements were cubed, not squared. Totally retarded.
Also, if somehow it exploded all we'd get are shards of ice and pools of water not gigantic oil spills...
I don't think you should drive a car. If it suddenly exploded while you were driving, it could impact local wildlife...
The point I'm trying to make is this--do you know how many oil rigs 'suddenly explode'? And the argument that we shouldn't construct one because it *might* have a problem someday is pretty lame.
I'm not saying you're wrong*, just that your arguments are.
*though, incidentally, you are.
I'll totally admit I screwed up my size argument--but as for my original argument that a telescope and an oil rig are both going to impact the environment, yet the environmentalists aren't bitching about a telescope--well, feel free to prove me wrong instead of just making foot notes*
*because arguments are resolved by showing facts, not by snide footnotes.
Environmentalists don't really complain about the idea of building one oil rig. Of those who are against, say, ANWR drilling, they mostly complain about building many oil rigs, and all the road and pipeline infrastructure needed to support them. Also, there isn't really any wildlife at the South Pole, other than assorted gnats.
The size of land they are talking about using in the ANWR has been compared to a postage stamp on a football field.
No matter what we do, wherever we do it, there will be an impact to the environment, or some species. But we can't stop everything we do because it will effect a frog, or herd of caribou or whatever. On the other hand, we can't be totally irresponsible either.
I bet in 2015 environmentalists will blame global warming for the extintion of the last ice telescope in the wild.
My first thought when reading the story is "Where the f*ck are all the environmentalists?"
It's apparently ok to screw around with a cubic kilometer of ice and wildlife for a telescope, but it's not ok to take up 0.2 kilometers for an oil rig...and notice I didn't say 'square'.
Well, sorta, if your definition of the beginning of time is 1995 or thereabouts ;) Before then, we had Write and its unhidable EOF character... This almost makes me want to fire up Windows 3.1 on some old machine and see if Write supported non-DOS line-endings like WordPad does.
</nitpicking>
--- Mr. DOS
That's the year I got my first IT job, so for me it's kinda like the sacred Unix Epoch. Nothing existed before it.
Oh please. Wordpad is like Notepad, only it can't make up its mind whether to be richtext or plaintext and it doesn't open files when you drop them into it.
Don't drop the files into the 'document area', drop them onto the 'menu bar' area and they'll open.
I f*cking hate wordpad, but it's the only thing that recognizes and saves unix line-endings and is installed on every windows box since the beginning of time.
You probably wouldn't want to, but you'd have to do what the NSA guys told you. And why would they want to sniff on my IP? Dunno, maybe just because my name is Middle Eastern (it's not, but let's assume that it was, for the sake of argument)?
True. I'd love to see it encrypted and anonymous, specifically for reasons like that. But your average ISP isn't interested in sifting through all your DNS traffic like that...
But as soon as you filter those 7 million by his IP (assuming that it's known; or by some other known tag), wouldn't the result be much more manageable?
Yeah, it would. But what would make me want to filter by a specific IP address in the first place? We had a /19, and several /24s. Why would I pick your IP out of the 9,000 other IPs in our network, or the who-knows-how-many IPs requesting information from outside our network?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all about privacy. That sort of information should be totally private--enforcably private (like encrypted) just like phone calls and associated records.
Why would the NSA decide to listen into my phone call. It will be one among millions or maybe even billions today.
I care about keeping DNS requests private. I personal would prefer that my ISP can't tell where I'm browsing just by grabbing clear-text domain names out of DNS queries.
Never worked for an ISP, huh?
I worked for a (small?) one about 8 years ago. 8 years ago we had on average 1,000 users connected, and also hosted several thousand domains, and had 30,000 mailboxes on our server.
In an average day, we handled around 70 DNS requests per second on our primary server and about 10 requests per second on our secondary. (Using Microsoft's crappy DNS server no less)
So tell me why I should bother sorting through roughly seven million DNS requests per day to see where you've been surfing?
It's in the same vein as "Do you read my email?". On a server with 30,000 mailboxes, and who knows how many messages coming in per-second, the answer is "f*ck no". The volume of mail is too great.
Of course what your average BOFH might admin over a few beers is that the only time we ever monitor something like mailboxes or DNS requests is when something brings them to our attention...like a user asking if we're monitoring their activities. "No, should we be?"
But DNSSEC uses all pre-computed signatures for the zone data. So if you can break the RSA key, you can create fake signatures ahead of time and serve bogus DNS data. Your botnet has got all the time in the world to try to break that key...
Bah! I prefer to hand-rotate the key in each zone file every 15 minutes. I don't sleep much^H^H^H^Hever.