I've never seen xorg.conf get corrupted the way the windows registry can
The windows registry is not your ordinary file structure. It was, I believe, an outgrowth of the old Digital RSX-11M,RSTS/E virtual table construct (yes, I am that old). The original purpose of that file architecture was to make an indexible in-memory structure map to locations on disk when memory was very expensive, and available addressability even more so. It sort of made sense when the language of choice was 16-bit Basic Plus. It gave the ability to manage large-ish tables using only array addressing in a highly constrained environment, via a movable address window. Sort of like proto-virtual memory coupled with a tree index structure.
However as ol' Ben Franklin said, two removes equal one fire, and when the format adapted from RSTS/E -> VMS -> NT the format suffered a wee bit from bit decay.
Considering how cheap and powerful hardware is today, it makes eminent sense to simply read the file in and parse it as you please, so xorg.conf makes a lot more sense now. It's simpler, and that appeals to me.
In all, the file format used by the Registry was just a clever piece of code once to make more out of less. A noble venture, venerable, and rather obsolete.
Well I suppose it could be possible to charge them with espionage against the Federal Government, which I think includes acts of intentional military sabotage. That way the scammers would be facing 15 years to life, without parole.
I think intent is important, here. If there was evidence of a deliberate attempt to degrade the capabilities of the military, on behalf of their alliegence to a foreign power, that would qualify as treason, I think. If their intent was simply to carve a larger margin by dubious practices, then a lesser charge would be appropriate. Might I suggest a jail term - in the brig of one of the destroyers they sold components to? Let them wear the same risk they asked of others.
Any useful organisation that depends on volunteers degrades when the original memes die.
The geeks invent it, the enlightened make it easy to use, a few champions popularise it, the bullies move in with the rest of the crowd and it's no longer interesting. It's a common pattern, really.
o To reduce the likelihood of re-offending (especially applies to incarceration).
o To serve as an example, to deter others from perpetrating the same offense
o Revenge
I'd like to add "public safety" to that. It's similar to point one, but with a slightly different emphasis. Incarceration is often seen as the only way to rehabilitate the offender. In point of fact, the public generally demands these extreme cases be met with a punishment that involves removing them from society altogether.
The ultimate best outcome would be for the offender to be completely and perfectly rehabilitated and the public to accept this, but outside some form of Clockwork Orange solution, you can't depend on it, nor am I sure it would be a good idea to go that route.
Balancing is the poor likelyhood of the public accepting that the rehabilitation is real and trustworthy.
To sum it up, it doesn't matter if the offender is rehabilitated or not, the public wants him out of the way.
I was very liberal about crime and punishment until I had daughters of my own. That changes things somehow. And yes, I'm glad he's gone.
I have perfect faith that at the end of the road is a giant alligator who will swallow my automobile whole.
I have perfect faith that at the end of the road is more road, that any point within that infinite road is the middle.
I have perfect faith that either of the above points are wrong, or right, or may be an incomplete or inaccurate assessment of the future of the road behaviour I have so far observed.
I have perfect faith that as I start moving, the road, and my theoretical model of it, may change on me.
I have perfect faith in science, in its ability to more accurately portray and predict the behaviour of nature than any of my articles of faith, save this one.
All discussions of the relevance of science vs. faith in the discovery of truth make me think rather highly of the arithmetic of infinities, set theory of science, faith, and their application to determining truth propounded by the rather interesting mind of Georg Cantor who thought large on this subject long, long ago.
I'm sure Cisco conveniently forgot to explain the concept of latency before they sold them voice service on and router in space.
Yes, latency being the problem it is, let's go back to half-duplex. In fact, let's go back to telegraphy. We should be able to do something with all that wire being displaced by all those wireless hot spots.
It would also be a good place to store a Linux distribution...of course that might not display the ads which is why I highly doubt that Google will do it. It would be far too easy to strip out the Google OS and install your own.
Quite correct, for those so inclined. Far too easy -- for those who would bother to break it. And for those, I can imagine Google could find it useful to have their name and brand associated with the cred of having a new toy for the technically-inclined community to play with. If it's fun to break, and easy to break, people will see a lot of them in the hands of geeks. Not a bad thing.
Because it will be a very small percentage of the users who would do more than boot & use, the rest of the user community would easily underwrite the jailbroken ones. Mostly they don't care about such tracking, because rightfully or wrongfully, Google is a name a lot of people trust.
Remember that Google is also investing a bit in the brand wars, and this could score a major coup against Bing, and that alone would be worth a pilot investment.
Also remember that among the larger population of computer users, the technically astute are still a minority.
I agree completely and I wonder why this is not considered an antitrust issue. I thought this behavior is basically the definition of antitrust; Using your monopoly in one market to force out competition in another market. Between paying off Murdoch *and* setting Bing as the default search engine in MS products, is this not illegal monopoly behavior?
Actually I think it's more accurately denoted as "anticompetitive". I think "antitrust law" involves collusion amongst members of a cartel. And a cartel is more a matter of independent companies colluding together to (say) fix prices. Artificially keeping petroleum or packaging product prices among independent vendors via golf-course agreements is "antitrust" - using a monopoly position to (for example) exclude competition in software or media content, however, would be "anticompetitive". Both terms are nasty, of course, just trying for a bit of clarity in terminology.
What is this fascination with "upgrading"? IE 8 is not much of an "upgrade" at all, its another version that has its share of problems. I really dislike the windows world of versioning, FOSS generally makes a lot more sense to me. If there are security issues with IE, in 6 7 or 8 they should be fixed as incremental versions. If a complete re-write happened, then it should be released as a new version, and its not really an upgrade, but a change.
Be grateful it's a Windows numeric version upgrade, young padawan. The ones with clever names are the ones you need watch out for.
When the world around a piece of running software changes, that piece of software in the middle often doesn't work like it used to. Yes, it's contextual, but it's also mostly true. It's often (humourously) referred to as the "principle of bit decay".
Ender's Game was a war story, Dune was about a prophet, the I Robot series was a detective series. They all took place in a fictional science setting. THAT is science fiction.
And the Niven-Pournelle "Footfall" saw that the role of science fiction - and science fiction writers - would also extend into the future, in a science fiction setting (a bit broken fourth-wall, but meta- or not, it worked). The following TFA quote:
Does sci-fi really have that great an impact on the technology that emerges from the labs of the world's biggest technology companies? Labs that are so well funded (Microsoft alone spent $8 billion on research last year) that they can afford to scoop up the brightest talent emerging from MIT and beyond? Indeed it does, according to Bruce Hillsberg, director of storage systems at IBM Research in Almaden. For him, the value of science fiction is that it "paints visions of the future that cause people to think about possibilities beyond what is possible today".
...was reminiscent of the Footfall "two war rooms" think tanks that were populated entirely with science fiction authors, for very good reasons. Read the book if you haven't yet, it's hard SF at it's hardest.
I found particularly poignant the reference to the Heinleins, when "The Ansons walked in. Man, the President doesn't get that kind of deference."
This stuff needs to continue. I'm going to log off WoW tonight and read a book.
Read some great science fiction novels: Frank Herbert's "Dune", Greg Bear's "Eon", Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", Asimov's "The End of Eternity", Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero".
Zounds! Add Niven's "Ringworld" to that and it would make a fine intro-to-hard-SF syllabus.
Really what your being unspecific about is the difference between upgrade versus an overhaul.
From the floor up (power, cooling, cabling, footprint) is an overhaul.
For the next stage up, where multiple floors-up are involved, you're talking to executives and you need to change your terminology to "Business Transformation".
Throw in a bit about "measurable carbon footprint reduction" and that's how you get the bucks for the water-cooled racks you've been eyeing, as well as the Travaglia-architecture security system;)
DECNet was easy. Although we did have to accommodate the occasional user who would $set host to another node, then back to their own, then off to another...
Virtualization isn't some "super cool" buzzword technology, it's a money saver. It reduces costs massively. It makes hardware maintenance an order of magnitude cheaper and safer. There's a reason everyone is switching to it.
Agree, with a small difference - I'd say there's a reason everyone has switched to it. It's pretty much mainstream technology now.
We've done server consolidation for people with only a few servers, and I've personally run a consolidation model for a public utility with several thousand servers.
The value we're getting is pretty much a minimum of 20:1 virtual:physical server ratio, with 40:1 more common and some environments running quite happily at 100:1. This is working, tested, and measured value improvement. And this is before you start considering the power savings, which can be rather extreme.
I'd say it's more of an "anti-buzzword", which has some real value to me (hearing damaged from the buzzing of server fans over far too many years).
Pardon my heresy - just making a point here - he could do well by virtualising on top of his existing equipment and end up with a few extra boxes to work with. Only if his budget is extremely limited, of course (agree with above posts on value of newer equipment, Linux based VM platform). But if he wants to make better use of what he's got with minimum disruption, VM'ing his existing boxes will very likely work for him.
Actually, seven year old servers might be more reliable than modern units, due to construction being (just) before the advent of ROHS directive for construction of electronic equipment. Lead-free solders, whether appropriate or not, have problems with tin whiskers growing over time that can short out tiny components.
The cut-over point was Feb 2003 for the European Union with a number of other countries following suit shortly thereafter. ROHS-compliant Equipment built after that point may be subject to age-and-use related failures irrespective of whether there are rotating components or unstable environments involved.
Used equipment still running after 7 years? Will probably be reliable. Used equipment slightly newer than PP described? Borderline, I think. You'll have to consider hardware redundancy more carefully with the newer stuff.
Why virtual servers? If you are going to run multiple services on one machine (and that's fine if it can handle the load) just do it.
Fast rollback for system changes for one thing (reboot the earlier version of the system disk), easier hardware upgrades (boot the virtual server image from a faster machine), better load balancing (see previous example). Even if your hardware:system instance ratio is best served 1:1 (a rare occurance) you could make an excellent case for going virtual.
I don't know about you, but I do not read or speak Cantonese or Mandarin (if that is what that was) and thus found it difficult to figure out what is what on that site.
Hey, that's no problem. Just use Google to translate that page and...
Slashdot Mirror
Leveraging synergies is just gibberish talk to impress the customer base....This guy must be in marketing.
Where we are required to have a sense of humour. Or more succinctly, "Whooosh!"
and most importantly, WTF is WTF????
Won't Think Further.
I've never seen xorg.conf get corrupted the way the windows registry can
The windows registry is not your ordinary file structure. It was, I believe, an outgrowth of the old Digital RSX-11M,RSTS/E virtual table construct (yes, I am that old). The original purpose of that file architecture was to make an indexible in-memory structure map to locations on disk when memory was very expensive, and available addressability even more so. It sort of made sense when the language of choice was 16-bit Basic Plus. It gave the ability to manage large-ish tables using only array addressing in a highly constrained environment, via a movable address window. Sort of like proto-virtual memory coupled with a tree index structure.
However as ol' Ben Franklin said, two removes equal one fire, and when the format adapted from RSTS/E -> VMS -> NT the format suffered a wee bit from bit decay.
Considering how cheap and powerful hardware is today, it makes eminent sense to simply read the file in and parse it as you please, so xorg.conf makes a lot more sense now. It's simpler, and that appeals to me.
In all, the file format used by the Registry was just a clever piece of code once to make more out of less. A noble venture, venerable, and rather obsolete.
well there is a type of vacumm chamber that could kill you a vacuum chamber, or the vacuum of spce
Less caffeine or more sleep, guy.
Well I suppose it could be possible to charge them with espionage against the Federal Government, which I think includes acts of intentional military sabotage. That way the scammers would be facing 15 years to life, without parole.
I think intent is important, here. If there was evidence of a deliberate attempt to degrade the capabilities of the military, on behalf of their alliegence to a foreign power, that would qualify as treason, I think. If their intent was simply to carve a larger margin by dubious practices, then a lesser charge would be appropriate. Might I suggest a jail term - in the brig of one of the destroyers they sold components to? Let them wear the same risk they asked of others.
Any useful organisation that depends on volunteers degrades when the original memes die.
The geeks invent it, the enlightened make it easy to use, a few champions popularise it, the bullies move in with the rest of the crowd and it's no longer interesting. It's a common pattern, really.
I'd like to add "public safety" to that. It's similar to point one, but with a slightly different emphasis. Incarceration is often seen as the only way to rehabilitate the offender. In point of fact, the public generally demands these extreme cases be met with a punishment that involves removing them from society altogether.
The ultimate best outcome would be for the offender to be completely and perfectly rehabilitated and the public to accept this, but outside some form of Clockwork Orange solution, you can't depend on it, nor am I sure it would be a good idea to go that route.
Balancing is the poor likelyhood of the public accepting that the rehabilitation is real and trustworthy.
To sum it up, it doesn't matter if the offender is rehabilitated or not, the public wants him out of the way.
I was very liberal about crime and punishment until I had daughters of my own. That changes things somehow. And yes, I'm glad he's gone.
I have perfect faith that at the end of the road is a giant alligator who will swallow my automobile whole.
I have perfect faith that at the end of the road is more road, that any point within that infinite road is the middle.
I have perfect faith that either of the above points are wrong, or right, or may be an incomplete or inaccurate assessment of the future of the road behaviour I have so far observed.
I have perfect faith that as I start moving, the road, and my theoretical model of it, may change on me.
I have perfect faith in science, in its ability to more accurately portray and predict the behaviour of nature than any of my articles of faith, save this one.
All discussions of the relevance of science vs. faith in the discovery of truth make me think rather highly of the arithmetic of infinities, set theory of science, faith, and their application to determining truth propounded by the rather interesting mind of Georg Cantor who thought large on this subject long, long ago.
I'm sure Cisco conveniently forgot to explain the concept of latency before they sold them voice service on and router in space.
Yes, latency being the problem it is, let's go back to half-duplex. In fact, let's go back to telegraphy. We should be able to do something with all that wire being displaced by all those wireless hot spots.
I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a Heisenberg today.
It would also be a good place to store a Linux distribution...of course that might not display the ads which is why I highly doubt that Google will do it. It would be far too easy to strip out the Google OS and install your own.
Quite correct, for those so inclined. Far too easy -- for those who would bother to break it. And for those, I can imagine Google could find it useful to have their name and brand associated with the cred of having a new toy for the technically-inclined community to play with. If it's fun to break, and easy to break, people will see a lot of them in the hands of geeks. Not a bad thing.
Because it will be a very small percentage of the users who would do more than boot & use, the rest of the user community would easily underwrite the jailbroken ones. Mostly they don't care about such tracking, because rightfully or wrongfully, Google is a name a lot of people trust.
Remember that Google is also investing a bit in the brand wars, and this could score a major coup against Bing, and that alone would be worth a pilot investment.
Also remember that among the larger population of computer users, the technically astute are still a minority.
I agree completely and I wonder why this is not considered an antitrust issue. I thought this behavior is basically the definition of antitrust; Using your monopoly in one market to force out competition in another market. Between paying off Murdoch *and* setting Bing as the default search engine in MS products, is this not illegal monopoly behavior?
Actually I think it's more accurately denoted as "anticompetitive". I think "antitrust law" involves collusion amongst members of a cartel. And a cartel is more a matter of independent companies colluding together to (say) fix prices. Artificially keeping petroleum or packaging product prices among independent vendors via golf-course agreements is "antitrust" - using a monopoly position to (for example) exclude competition in software or media content, however, would be "anticompetitive". Both terms are nasty, of course, just trying for a bit of clarity in terminology.
What is this fascination with "upgrading"? IE 8 is not much of an "upgrade" at all, its another version that has its share of problems. I really dislike the windows world of versioning, FOSS generally makes a lot more sense to me. If there are security issues with IE, in 6 7 or 8 they should be fixed as incremental versions. If a complete re-write happened, then it should be released as a new version, and its not really an upgrade, but a change.
Be grateful it's a Windows numeric version upgrade, young padawan. The ones with clever names are the ones you need watch out for.
Software doesn't wear out.
Yes it does.
When the world around a piece of running software changes, that piece of software in the middle often doesn't work like it used to. Yes, it's contextual, but it's also mostly true. It's often (humourously) referred to as the "principle of bit decay".
Basically, if it works, it's obsolete.
Ender's Game was a war story, Dune was about a prophet, the I Robot series was a detective series. They all took place in a fictional science setting. THAT is science fiction.
And the Niven-Pournelle "Footfall" saw that the role of science fiction - and science fiction writers - would also extend into the future, in a science fiction setting (a bit broken fourth-wall, but meta- or not, it worked). The following TFA quote:
...was reminiscent of the Footfall "two war rooms" think tanks that were populated entirely with science fiction authors, for very good reasons. Read the book if you haven't yet, it's hard SF at it's hardest.
I found particularly poignant the reference to the Heinleins, when "The Ansons walked in. Man, the President doesn't get that kind of deference."
This stuff needs to continue. I'm going to log off WoW tonight and read a book.
Read some great science fiction novels: Frank Herbert's "Dune", Greg Bear's "Eon", Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", Asimov's "The End of Eternity", Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero".
Zounds! Add Niven's "Ringworld" to that and it would make a fine intro-to-hard-SF syllabus.
Nonsense! The world will be saved...BY STEAM!
It already has. Or is that you, Mr. Babbage, speaking to us via your intricate brass time machine?
For the next stage up, where multiple floors-up are involved, you're talking to executives and you need to change your terminology to "Business Transformation".
Throw in a bit about "measurable carbon footprint reduction" and that's how you get the bucks for the water-cooled racks you've been eyeing, as well as the Travaglia-architecture security system ;)
Conf? You youngsters...(sigh) I miss $SET HOST
DECNet was easy. Although we did have to accommodate the occasional user who would $set host to another node, then back to their own, then off to another...
Virtualization isn't some "super cool" buzzword technology, it's a money saver. It reduces costs massively. It makes hardware maintenance an order of magnitude cheaper and safer. There's a reason everyone is switching to it.
Agree, with a small difference - I'd say there's a reason everyone has switched to it. It's pretty much mainstream technology now.
We've done server consolidation for people with only a few servers, and I've personally run a consolidation model for a public utility with several thousand servers.
The value we're getting is pretty much a minimum of 20:1 virtual:physical server ratio, with 40:1 more common and some environments running quite happily at 100:1. This is working, tested, and measured value improvement. And this is before you start considering the power savings, which can be rather extreme.
I'd say it's more of an "anti-buzzword", which has some real value to me (hearing damaged from the buzzing of server fans over far too many years).
Pardon my heresy - just making a point here - he could do well by virtualising on top of his existing equipment and end up with a few extra boxes to work with. Only if his budget is extremely limited, of course (agree with above posts on value of newer equipment, Linux based VM platform). But if he wants to make better use of what he's got with minimum disruption, VM'ing his existing boxes will very likely work for him.
The cut-over point was Feb 2003 for the European Union with a number of other countries following suit shortly thereafter. ROHS-compliant Equipment built after that point may be subject to age-and-use related failures irrespective of whether there are rotating components or unstable environments involved.
Used equipment still running after 7 years? Will probably be reliable. Used equipment slightly newer than PP described? Borderline, I think. You'll have to consider hardware redundancy more carefully with the newer stuff.
Why virtual servers? If you are going to run multiple services on one machine (and that's fine if it can handle the load) just do it.
Fast rollback for system changes for one thing (reboot the earlier version of the system disk), easier hardware upgrades (boot the virtual server image from a faster machine), better load balancing (see previous example). Even if your hardware:system instance ratio is best served 1:1 (a rare occurance) you could make an excellent case for going virtual.
Most Americans have never heard of Ron Paul, let alone anyone who isn't from the USA.
Isn't he the guy who got into the zeppelin wars with Cory Doctorow? I forget which colour his lightsabre was, though.
- Australian
I don't know about you, but I do not read or speak Cantonese or Mandarin (if that is what that was) and thus found it difficult to figure out what is what on that site.
Hey, that's no problem. Just use Google to translate that page and...
Oh, wait.