I don't have numbers, but I have witnessed it. The worst PSU case was with some IBM SP2 systems. These have multiple redundant power supplies. However, a design/manufacturing fault in some early parts meant that they were prone to failure on power-up and when they failed they'd trigger a failure in their bretheren. I encountered this the first time when we had a rack powered off for hardware maintenance, so the good news was we already had a scheduled outage. However, what with getting replacement parts the outage had to be extended by a couple of hours which wasn't popular with our users.
I've also seen PSUs fail on normal tower servers when they're powered on. A case which comes to mind was, again, a server powered off for hardware maintenance. One PSU failed at power-on but fortunately this time the redundant PSU was OK.
I've seen a couple of other types of hardware problems. The most common was with disk drives. Some older SCSi disks sufferred from stiction if left powered down for a prolonged period, (over an hour, say). Sometimes you could revive them with a bit of physical intervention; somteimes not. The worst case was when we had our entire machine room powered off for upgrades to the power supply. When we came to restart two servers wouldn't reboot because their boot disks wouldn't spin up, and half a dozen or so external disks failed. (Mostly these were mirrored, so it wasn't the end of the world, and the servers weren't critical.)
Several years ago we had a weird problem with a server, which took a while to identify. We got a lot of weird, intermittent I/O and memory errors, (iirc). Never actually brought the server down but they caused some application glitches and we couldn't find the cause. Eventually, one of the engineers worked out that a connector to one of the boards hadn't been seated correctly. Every time the server was shutdown, the pins would cool down and contract; when they heated up again they expanded and loosened the connector slightly, leading to the errors.
There may be something to be said for powering off idle equipment, but if so I think it's particularly important to have some redundancy built in.
That's one option. It'd make sense to boot it every month or two, just to confirm that it still works, and maybe to take a fresh backup now and then.
Faced with a similar situation, I simply stopped the relevant application and used the server for something else. No need to waste perfectly good hardware.
Thanks for that. I only just upgraded to 8.04 and hadn't planned to upgrade to 8.10 for a while, but since I'm soon to be out of work I should have some time on my hands.:-/
Sadly, while Ubuntu is quite capable of shutting the machine off, it can't quite get the hang of resuming.
Ah! Not just me then. It seemed to work OK with 7.10 but not 8.04. I only upgraded fairly recently so I haven't had a chance to poke at it but so far I haven't gotten it to succesfully resume.:-(
Since it's my taxes that pay for it, I'm quite happy to see the registration lapse. This is a bit of a non-story and wouldn't be an issue if other people kept their links up-to-date.
I think it's more that they don't quite understand the clearing process. Most people think that once a cheque has cleared the money's in their account for good and aren't aware that their bank can take it back later - with no time limit. The banks haven't gone out of their way to make that clear, either.
I think the point was that it's no longer civil servants doing the work, but short-term contractors. A civil servant who's expecting to stick around for a long time and pick up a very generous pension - and at the top end a knighthood or some other honour - might care more about doing a good job - or at least, not screwing up too badly - than someone who knows they're only going to be around for a year or two before moving on to something else.
I think that there's also more of a tendancy to try to bypass the rules if you're a short-termer, possibly working to a tight deadline and maybe with a one-off need. A long-term employee might realise that they're going to face the same situation again and so take the time to figure out how to do things properly.
It's not as easy to do as all that. My PC at work actually has encrypted folders disabled: I couldn't create one if I wanted to (and I do want to). I assume that this is so that if I have some important information on my PC the company can still get at it if I drop dead.
To do the job properly something a bit more sophisticated than standard Windows tools is required: something that will let the employer gain access to the data if necessary.
I think your thinking is too limited. What about the rise of mobile devices? Billions of cell 'phones soon; I dread to think how many RFID chips. And who knows what else? These are things which really need globally unique IDs. IPv6 is intended to be overkill, so that whatever comes along it'll be able to cope.
Regarding the addressing issue which seems to concern so many people, DNS should handle most of it, (truly unique numbers actually make that simpler, I'd think). If you really need to speak to someone about a number, in most cases you should just be able to give them the last few bytes. "1428:57ab" seems fairly manageable.
Oh, and one other thing. Some of it may be deliberate on the part of security services to discourage protesters and other citizens from taking pictures of potentially illegal, unethical or just unflattering activity by police and others. That fear goes back to Rodney King.
It's not just the US: there have been reports of photographers here in the UK getting hassled by people - including the police - for taking pictures in public places.
I think it's because a lot of people have bought into the security theatre, including police officers who should know better. Govt says so-and-so has all this dangerous information in his home, including photos of potential targets and eventually everyone starts thinking that photos are in some way dangerous.
With the number of cameras around it is a bit ridiculous. CCTVs in nearly every town centre; digital cameras in everybody's pockets; Google's lovely camera cars. Some enthusiast with an SLR really isn't a threat: someone who wanted pictures for nefarious purposes could get them quite simply with no-one the wiser.
People, (even me!) tend to stick with papers/web sites/TV shows that they're comfortable with, ones that broadly reflect their existing views. Commercial news media reinforce that because if they say uncomfortable things they lose sales.
It's a reflection of one of the problems with share-owning. When a business is owned by a person, he or she can chose to run it however they want, hopefully in an ethical manner. When it's owned by a bunch of faceless share-holders then the bottom line becomes the only thing that matters. Nobody can stand up and say "this may cost us money but it's the right thing to do".
So journalists write pap for the masses, factories polute, businesses sack people on a whim to save a few quid.
It occurs to me that if you asked a bunch of economists, they'd probably say that people don't know enough about economics. Same for any other field.
That's not to say that people shouldn't know more about science. Though perhaps what we should really be seeking is a better performance from those we trust to guide our opionions, i.e. mainstream journalists.
It seems absurd that in an age when science has more and more impact on our day to day lives fewer and fewer pupils want to study it. Part of the problem over here is with the education system, where science GCSEs are perceived as being more difficult than the hummanities. I don't know whether that's true or not; my recollection (pre-GCSEs) was that science was easier, but that was because it was vastly more interesting than English or history.
A slight digression, but how many people do serious testing of software against different dates?
I did a lot about 10 years ago, but none since. Back when I was a developer, I don't recall doing any full-scale tests with future dates, (just simple stuff to check particular chunks of code). Of course, I was just an in-house programmer, not producing anything to be sold to other companies.
How would you go about doing such testing? For Y2K we had some specific target dates so we could just reset the clock to a bit before each one and see what happened. It'd be really tough - and time consuming - to test every possible date from now until the product goes out of support.
Figuring out all those things in advance is what DR testing is for.
I used to be heavily involved in DR: some of my tests even worked.:-) We encountered occasional licence problems but they were all very simple to resolve. Most of the stuff I was concerned with (AIX servers) didn't much care where it was run. The software which did had ways around it specifically for DR. SAP, for example, has a quick tool you can run to get a temporary licence, good for 30 days, iirc.
Really, it's not that difficult. Or if it is, the problems are with amateurish software providers or poorly conceived DR plans and testing.
I'm not terribly familiar with VMWare and its licensing, but in general I think that the concern is that the customer will deploy more instances than they are licensed for. I've certainly been in the position that I wanted to get a piece of desktop software installed but the company had run out of licences for it.
I've also been in a similar position with server upgrades: wanting to upgrade a bunch of servers but not having licenses for all of them. It was very tempting to just do the upgrade and worry about the licenses later, which potentially would have denied the software provider revenue. (How likely would I have been to back-date my license purchase?)
never underestimate just how bad a system written by a less-than-competant programmer can be. Sometimes it can be so bad you fail to understand how they came up with it.
Even worse is a system written by someone who's talented, but not quite as good as they think they are. Worst of all is the "genius" programmer who decides to use some design methodology that nobody else has ever heard of. There's a lot to be said for the boring, mediocre programmer.
Try reversing that: if the suggested solution is not against the law, then neither was what she did. Also consider substiting morals or ethics for law.
I've worked with an 800x480 screen and found it OK, but that's clearly going to vary from person to person. For me, the quality of the keyboard is more important, but I'd put up with quite a lot of compromises for a device I'm only going to use intermitttently when travelling.
As regards the storage, I guess the idea is that you use an external device for most data. In the context of this thread, the obvious thing would be to store everything at a secure, remote location.
If anyone wasn't thorough, it was me.:-) I should have taken the trouble to read the article again.
I suspect a card with a chip in it would qualify as an electronic device.
Mind you, I doubt that they'd really want to bother. If anyone wanted to smuggle data through I'm sure there are more convenient ways, even if they didn't want to download it at their destination.
The USA has been off my list of desirable destinations for a while now. I'm not seriously worried that something dreadful would happen to me, but I am opposed in principle to some of the stuff I'd have to go through - fingerprinting for example - and wouldn't look forward to the hassle of it all. It took long enough last time I visited the USA, before 9/11; I'm not going to volunteer to subject myself to that if there's a more convenient alternative. Just as easy and pleasant to visit Canada, New Zealand or umpteen other places, if it's merely for a holiday.
Not going to happen. Those countries which don't already do this would probabaly like to so they're not likely to complain. Although I don't think anywhere else has been as heavy-handed as the USA, yet.
Does it specify "electronic device"? I thought it was just "device", capable of storing digital or analog data. If they wanted to push it, that could include your credit cards or anything else with a magnetic strip or embedded microchip.
For me, one of the main selling points of the EEE and its recent ilk is not their small size, but their low cost, so that it's not unrealistic to have an entirely separate machine for travelling around. One which can be kept mostly empty and is almost dispossable; just enough for downloading photos from my camera and doing a bit of email and web-surfing. (Which is one of the reasons I don't entirely understand the drive behind the more expensive, higher-spec versions which have been coming out.)
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I don't have numbers, but I have witnessed it.
The worst PSU case was with some IBM SP2 systems. These have multiple redundant power supplies. However, a design/manufacturing fault in some early parts meant that they were prone to failure on power-up and when they failed they'd trigger a failure in their bretheren. I encountered this the first time when we had a rack powered off for hardware maintenance, so the good news was we already had a scheduled outage. However, what with getting replacement parts the outage had to be extended by a couple of hours which wasn't popular with our users.
I've also seen PSUs fail on normal tower servers when they're powered on. A case which comes to mind was, again, a server powered off for hardware maintenance. One PSU failed at power-on but fortunately this time the redundant PSU was OK.
I've seen a couple of other types of hardware problems. The most common was with disk drives. Some older SCSi disks sufferred from stiction if left powered down for a prolonged period, (over an hour, say). Sometimes you could revive them with a bit of physical intervention; somteimes not. The worst case was when we had our entire machine room powered off for upgrades to the power supply. When we came to restart two servers wouldn't reboot because their boot disks wouldn't spin up, and half a dozen or so external disks failed. (Mostly these were mirrored, so it wasn't the end of the world, and the servers weren't critical.)
Several years ago we had a weird problem with a server, which took a while to identify. We got a lot of weird, intermittent I/O and memory errors, (iirc). Never actually brought the server down but they caused some application glitches and we couldn't find the cause. Eventually, one of the engineers worked out that a connector to one of the boards hadn't been seated correctly. Every time the server was shutdown, the pins would cool down and contract; when they heated up again they expanded and loosened the connector slightly, leading to the errors.
There may be something to be said for powering off idle equipment, but if so I think it's particularly important to have some redundancy built in.
That's one option. It'd make sense to boot it every month or two, just to confirm that it still works, and maybe to take a fresh backup now and then.
Faced with a similar situation, I simply stopped the relevant application and used the server for something else. No need to waste perfectly good hardware.
Thanks for that. I only just upgraded to 8.04 and hadn't planned to upgrade to 8.10 for a while, but since I'm soon to be out of work I should have some time on my hands. :-/
Sadly, while Ubuntu is quite capable of shutting the machine off, it can't quite get the hang of resuming.
Ah! Not just me then. :-(
It seemed to work OK with 7.10 but not 8.04. I only upgraded fairly recently so I haven't had a chance to poke at it but so far I haven't gotten it to succesfully resume.
Since it's my taxes that pay for it, I'm quite happy to see the registration lapse. This is a bit of a non-story and wouldn't be an issue if other people kept their links up-to-date.
I think it's more that they don't quite understand the clearing process. Most people think that once a cheque has cleared the money's in their account for good and aren't aware that their bank can take it back later - with no time limit. The banks haven't gone out of their way to make that clear, either.
I think the point was that it's no longer civil servants doing the work, but short-term contractors. A civil servant who's expecting to stick around for a long time and pick up a very generous pension - and at the top end a knighthood or some other honour - might care more about doing a good job - or at least, not screwing up too badly - than someone who knows they're only going to be around for a year or two before moving on to something else.
I think that there's also more of a tendancy to try to bypass the rules if you're a short-termer, possibly working to a tight deadline and maybe with a one-off need. A long-term employee might realise that they're going to face the same situation again and so take the time to figure out how to do things properly.
It's not as easy to do as all that.
My PC at work actually has encrypted folders disabled: I couldn't create one if I wanted to (and I do want to). I assume that this is so that if I have some important information on my PC the company can still get at it if I drop dead.
To do the job properly something a bit more sophisticated than standard Windows tools is required: something that will let the employer gain access to the data if necessary.
I think your thinking is too limited. What about the rise of mobile devices? Billions of cell 'phones soon; I dread to think how many RFID chips. And who knows what else? These are things which really need globally unique IDs. IPv6 is intended to be overkill, so that whatever comes along it'll be able to cope.
Regarding the addressing issue which seems to concern so many people, DNS should handle most of it, (truly unique numbers actually make that simpler, I'd think). If you really need to speak to someone about a number, in most cases you should just be able to give them the last few bytes. "1428:57ab" seems fairly manageable.
Oh, and one other thing. Some of it may be deliberate on the part of security services to discourage protesters and other citizens from taking pictures of potentially illegal, unethical or just unflattering activity by police and others. That fear goes back to Rodney King.
It's not just the US: there have been reports of photographers here in the UK getting hassled by people - including the police - for taking pictures in public places.
I think it's because a lot of people have bought into the security theatre, including police officers who should know better. Govt says so-and-so has all this dangerous information in his home, including photos of potential targets and eventually everyone starts thinking that photos are in some way dangerous.
With the number of cameras around it is a bit ridiculous. CCTVs in nearly every town centre; digital cameras in everybody's pockets; Google's lovely camera cars. Some enthusiast with an SLR really isn't a threat: someone who wanted pictures for nefarious purposes could get them quite simply with no-one the wiser.
People, (even me!) tend to stick with papers/web sites/TV shows that they're comfortable with, ones that broadly reflect their existing views. Commercial news media reinforce that because if they say uncomfortable things they lose sales.
It's a reflection of one of the problems with share-owning. When a business is owned by a person, he or she can chose to run it however they want, hopefully in an ethical manner. When it's owned by a bunch of faceless share-holders then the bottom line becomes the only thing that matters. Nobody can stand up and say "this may cost us money but it's the right thing to do".
So journalists write pap for the masses, factories polute, businesses sack people on a whim to save a few quid.
It occurs to me that if you asked a bunch of economists, they'd probably say that people don't know enough about economics. Same for any other field.
That's not to say that people shouldn't know more about science. Though perhaps what we should really be seeking is a better performance from those we trust to guide our opionions, i.e. mainstream journalists.
It's not just a problem for public opinion. Here in the UK, buisness leaders say there are not enough young people studying science at school.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7553040.stm
It seems absurd that in an age when science has more and more impact on our day to day lives fewer and fewer pupils want to study it. Part of the problem over here is with the education system, where science GCSEs are perceived as being more difficult than the hummanities. I don't know whether that's true or not; my recollection (pre-GCSEs) was that science was easier, but that was because it was vastly more interesting than English or history.
A slight digression, but how many people do serious testing of software against different dates?
I did a lot about 10 years ago, but none since. Back when I was a developer, I don't recall doing any full-scale tests with future dates, (just simple stuff to check particular chunks of code). Of course, I was just an in-house programmer, not producing anything to be sold to other companies.
How would you go about doing such testing? For Y2K we had some specific target dates so we could just reset the clock to a bit before each one and see what happened. It'd be really tough - and time consuming - to test every possible date from now until the product goes out of support.
Figuring out all those things in advance is what DR testing is for.
I used to be heavily involved in DR: some of my tests even worked. :-) We encountered occasional licence problems but they were all very simple to resolve. Most of the stuff I was concerned with (AIX servers) didn't much care where it was run. The software which did had ways around it specifically for DR.
SAP, for example, has a quick tool you can run to get a temporary licence, good for 30 days, iirc.
Really, it's not that difficult. Or if it is, the problems are with amateurish software providers or poorly conceived DR plans and testing.
I'm not terribly familiar with VMWare and its licensing, but in general I think that the concern is that the customer will deploy more instances than they are licensed for. I've certainly been in the position that I wanted to get a piece of desktop software installed but the company had run out of licences for it.
I've also been in a similar position with server upgrades: wanting to upgrade a bunch of servers but not having licenses for all of them. It was very tempting to just do the upgrade and worry about the licenses later, which potentially would have denied the software provider revenue. (How likely would I have been to back-date my license purchase?)
Even worse is a system written by someone who's talented, but not quite as good as they think they are. Worst of all is the "genius" programmer who decides to use some design methodology that nobody else has ever heard of. There's a lot to be said for the boring, mediocre programmer.
With Linux making some small inroads on the desktop, (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/05/2310205 http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/04/2140203 ) it's going to become a worthwhile target for malware soon. I suspect we're going to find out just how secure it is. Fingers crossed...
Try reversing that: if the suggested solution is not against the law, then neither was what she did. Also consider substiting morals or ethics for law.
I've worked with an 800x480 screen and found it OK, but that's clearly going to vary from person to person. For me, the quality of the keyboard is more important, but I'd put up with quite a lot of compromises for a device I'm only going to use intermitttently when travelling.
As regards the storage, I guess the idea is that you use an external device for most data. In the context of this thread, the obvious thing would be to store everything at a secure, remote location.
If anyone wasn't thorough, it was me. :-) I should have taken the trouble to read the article again.
I suspect a card with a chip in it would qualify as an electronic device.
Mind you, I doubt that they'd really want to bother. If anyone wanted to smuggle data through I'm sure there are more convenient ways, even if they didn't want to download it at their destination.
The USA has been off my list of desirable destinations for a while now. I'm not seriously worried that something dreadful would happen to me, but I am opposed in principle to some of the stuff I'd have to go through - fingerprinting for example - and wouldn't look forward to the hassle of it all. It took long enough last time I visited the USA, before 9/11; I'm not going to volunteer to subject myself to that if there's a more convenient alternative. Just as easy and pleasant to visit Canada, New Zealand or umpteen other places, if it's merely for a holiday.
Not going to happen. Those countries which don't already do this would probabaly like to so they're not likely to complain. Although I don't think anywhere else has been as heavy-handed as the USA, yet.
Does it specify "electronic device"? I thought it was just "device", capable of storing digital or analog data. If they wanted to push it, that could include your credit cards or anything else with a magnetic strip or embedded microchip.
For me, one of the main selling points of the EEE and its recent ilk is not their small size, but their low cost, so that it's not unrealistic to have an entirely separate machine for travelling around. One which can be kept mostly empty and is almost dispossable; just enough for downloading photos from my camera and doing a bit of email and web-surfing. (Which is one of the reasons I don't entirely understand the drive behind the more expensive, higher-spec versions which have been coming out.)