Let me repeat it again: the vast majority of poor performances observed with RAID 5 is due to BAD HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATIONS
Let me repeat, I'm an operations guy, and BAD IMPLEMENTATION = DON'T USE. Theoretic performance that does not map to the real world is of little use outside the classroom.
Now also note: I have never said RAID 5 is generically bad, there are places where its works quite well. I use it a lot myself, after modeling the I/O I expect the volume to see. The OP was stating more "RAID 5 is the cat's pajama's, always use RAID 5", and I suspect given the ASK SLASHDOT senario that he might be better off with the RAID 1 (or 1+0 ask he stated) than RAID 5. When pushed hard with -random- I/O, I've seen orders of magnitude better performance, though I'll admit I always stick to high end hardware controllers over software implementations in those tests. And notably, my EMC is configured with RAID 5 because the battery backed cache allows confirmations of write to be sent as soon as the data is in RAM, negating a lot of the random write issues
because I think this line of thinking could lead to strange places
Such as the fact XP has default "admin shares" of the local drives, so that copying the music anyware on your hard drive could technically be construed as "making available for distribution". This leads to some really bad places if the interpretation is that general.
Modern OSes have efficient fs caching mechanisms, increasing the chance of already having the 2 blocks in the buffer cache, so that only 2 writes are required for RAID 5.
That would be a non-random write. Writing data that has been relatively recently read, and noatbly the entire "stripe" would have to be in cache for both parity and data. "There are some cases where the performance is the same" is not a compelling arguement. I find the caching algorithms are far better at allowing RAID 1 to match RAID 5 read performance than letting RAID 5 match RAID 1's write performance. But perhaps thats because I'm wasting my time with real world performance metrics than theoretical models
Random small writes usually represent a small fraction of all the I/O operations in a typical file server scenario (what the OP wants to build).
It depends on what the users will be placing there and how they are using it. Are they storing digital photos in the space? Are they dumping backups there occasionaly? Then you might be right. But if he's expecting a LOT of concurrent usage, I'd expect more small random I/O's of users actively using the space. MS Office Auto saves, etc.
Well it seems you are the one who doesn't understand how write operations are commited to a RAID 5 array
What I understand is real world performance, I'm an operations guy. I keep trying to convince myself that RAID 5 should be able to compete (n-1/n efficiency is so much nicer than n/2), but when the bits hit the bus, with real data and real users, RAID 5 tanks when pushed to the limit.
Note I'm not saying RAID 1 is always better than RAID 5. But some newcomers to the world of RAID seem to think its the ultimate solution, I've seen lots of inappropriate applications of the technology.
It's amazing the amount of misinformation and misconceptions about RAID that is spread around the world. I hate to say it but 95% of IT engineers don't make good choices regarding RAID servers because of all those misconceptions.
Can we add you to the list?
RAID 5 has great READ performance, since it is effectively an n-1 stripe on read. However, WRITE performance can be abysmal, especially in random I/O situations like the one the article is proposing. In order to change a one byte on a disk, n-1 disks must be read and new parity data calculated, then two disks (data + parity) must be written to. A simple RAID 1 only requires two writes.
RAID 1 can also show gains in random reads, since a smart contoller (or linux's MD drivers) can read the data drive and the mirror drive simultaneously, meaning no time is wasted thrashing drive heads between two tracks.
I've tested RAID 5 in real world situations, and in real random I/O environments like databases the performance differences are eye popping. I use RAID 5 when efficiency counts over performance, RAID 1 (with lots of independant volumes when possible, a single FS structure can also be a bottleneck) for performance.
My company's standard contracts state that they can be terminated by either side for any reason at any time.
Otherwise known as at will employment. But even though the contract says "any reason", federal law spells out several reasons you can't be fired for. A lawsuit alledging someone was really fired for one of those reasons can be a pain, so HR usually want a good solid reason for firing before they'll let you fire anyone.
The article seems to imply that most bosses don't change, yet it's suggesting workers to change job.
The article seems to focus on the "overgrown technologist", seems he's the kind of boss that will go away in 6 months to a year and be happier for it; a better article would be how to deal with an abusive boss that upper management likes. They are often blind to the negative impact a boss like this can have on an organization.
Copyright should last as long as the artists are alive.
Why? If I invent a better moustrap, should I be granted exclusive rights to produce the moustrap for life? This is not to say I can't make money producing widgets all my life, but at some point my exclusive control goes away. Can you give a single reason why an entity should be given exclusive control over a creative work for such a long time (50+ years). Work with significant historical value can get lost to time because of this.
Your solutions are basically "keep producing or die". That's nonsense.
Strawman arguement. A 5 year copyright limit does not prevent an artist from continuing to make money from a work after it expires, just that somebody else can sing my song, reproduce my content, etc., without having to track me down (often the biggest issue) and getting my permission.
For the record, I used it for printing, and it rocks. No messing with cables, I walk to the printer room, point my laptop the right way, and hit print. I now also use it to download my workout data from my Polar Heart Monitor. Of course, you obviously don't know me...
Because it is the way they lived, many people don't have a clue of what it takes to live like a caveman
Reminds me of a story about Monty Python & the Holy Grail. They had no idea what peasants did on the Middle Ages (they are commedienes, not historians) so they just had they play in the mud for the most part. Given most "primitive" tribes are fairly clean relative to the common caveman image, it seems more likely that some movie maker in the 30's just decided cavemen should be dirty and grunt, and every portrayal since then has its roots in that original image. The fact there might be some truth in it (god knows I've met dirty grunters in modern homo sapiens) doesn't make it an acurate portrayal.
The consumers interest lies in the product and services he offers, not in how profitable or efficient his business is.
But the consumer is interested in getting exactly the computer they wanted quickly and at a very low cost. They don't care how it gets done, but they do care that it gets done. If it weren't for Dell driving the industry to lower prices, computers would cost hundreds more, the market would be smaller (higher prices = smaller market), etc. Sure, someone would eventually push costs lower, but the fact is Dell is consistently leading the push, and when the market slows down and competitors start thinking of raising costs to recover profitability, Dell announces price cuts to drive competitors out of business. Consumers ARE interested.
Another key difference is that while Urchin logs you data to a local database you control, Urchin effectively logs all you traffic to Google. Call me crazy, but thats a little creepy, and nobody in my company wanted to give that data to Google, so we'll be sticking with the old version and then migrating off.
You do need detailed computer forensics when you are stupid enough not to revoke admin privledges when you fire someone.
It was not his account he was using to access it, but rather an auxilary "Admin-level" card he stole. He was in charge of admin-ing the SecureID tokens, and had issued "spare" or "loaner" tokens. Bad security policy yes, but perhaps they outsourced his job because he made stupid policy decisions. Perhasp they should have done a full audit when he was let go, but in large companies this can be extremely difficult and disruptive, and still doesn't cover all the potential backdoors/traps/trojans a malicious admin could lay. The reality is you trust professionals to do whast right, they were already ahead of the game using token based authentication, its impossible for him to have a co-workers password
Blaming the victim is always bad policy, and you should feel no remorse for a criminal who has put IT professionals in a bad light. This wasn't one stupid momment, it was a series of really dumb decisions.
1. Steal SecureID token from company you no longer work for
2. Access (9 times at least!) former company's private network
3. Vandalize former comapny by deleting data
Personally, I'd feel fine if the company added lost productivity to the toll, not just for the manager, but for any projects that were delayed as a result of his criminal behavior, etc. This idiot got off light, don't be an idiot yourself and sympathize with him.
Not sure how to respond because I don't know what you mean. I know the difference between gigabit and gigabyte, but I'm not sure how it relates to my concerns.
Are you concerned that I mentioned the 4GB address limit and want to point out that 16Gb is less than 4 GB? I realize that, and also realise that multiple chips are often used together, and that his computer already had RAM in needed for running his web browser, etc. TFA was about these chips replacing hard drives, so staying on-topic those are two reasons why RAM is not a viable alternative.
The OP stated he would use them for swap. This could have been a joke because flash does not do well in an extensive rewriting environment like swap, or he could have been serious because swap is one area that would see a lot of benefit from fast random I/O.
The grandparent responded to this that he'd rather just use RAM. Now, you could thing he was arguing for using a "ramdisk" for swap (which is faster still, and doesn't suffer the re-write issues of flash), and my "data is lost when power is lost" is something of a non-issue in that use. Or he could have ben cracking a joke about using a RAMdisk for swap, the place you put stuff when you run out of RAM (ie its just a wacky idea, though some bad memory models made this a good idea in the past).
Of course, TFA is also kind of silly because flash chips have long been used as a substitute for hard drives in systems. The Pix 515 is a BX based 166Mhz PC with its OS on a flash chip, just as an example, not to mention just about every PDA I've owned over the last 5 years. But its a press release you you sort of expect that.
On the other hand, if I'm wrong, I'd be interested in knowing it. I'm opinionated, but I'm willing to change my mind if you can make a convincing argument to the contrary.
Ok, the population of the US is only 295 million, so the original economics ($1 downloads resulting in $200M income is insane, even if you account for non-US sales.) Look at the costs of producing a movie, then deduct the cost of the current duplication and distribution model, I can't imagine it being $1M even on a massively distributed blockbuster, and in the proposed model you still have distribution costs (servers, bandwidth, etc. How many users will object to the movie companies stealing their bandwidth if they use Bittorrent type distribution?). So lets get crazy and assume 3x more people spend that dollar (The cost has nothing to do with whether or not I see a movie on a given weekend, and if I go I bring a date, so watching at home via download means 2 former sales were lost, so my 3x more "spenders" corresponds to at least a 6x bigger audience who wish to spend 2 hours sitting around watching that box in their living room (assuming they have all bothered hook up some sort of download system to their comfy viewing screen (and not gathered around their 15" computer screen).
So, 6x more viewers results in 3x more buys results in about 1/3rd the income. Say a $30M movie now only costs $29M, the "average" movie barely makes 10% (movie studios are not crazy money makers, why else would they be going out of business, or not going nuts on the stock market?). So We'll estimate the $30M movie would have made $33M, but now will make $11M. So we need to find a way to make the movie for $10M to keep our margins. Well, you can strip out advertising costs (US jobs in media and agencies), but then you risk further shrinking you market (you're trying to attract 6x more viewers to hit this # remember). You could pay the actors less (with lots of secondary economic effects), or use no-name actors (and risk shrinking your market, hiring Tom Hanks has as much to do with advertising as acting ability). You can make less lavish sets (employ few technicians), spend less on wardrobe (fewer designers, costumers), shoot fewer retakes (shorter production schedules means less work overall). And lets not forget the loss of theater jobs.
Not that I'm assuming some sort of perfect DRM so that after I watch the movie Friday I can't give it to my freinds and let them watch (expanding the "viewers/buyer ratio" from my initial 2 to 4 or 6 or 10,000 (when the initial buyer puts the $1 download up on a P2P network).
Can't really cite examples, because shockingly almost no markets have chosen to self destruct in this way by suddenly slashing income and devaluing their product so massively.
Michael Dell has little to do with innovation. Definitely an important figure head in the sale of computers but not so much the invention side.
Go to business school, you'll get an earful of Micheal Dell because all of his innovations are in the production process, Just in Time manufacturing, mass customization, no inventory, started from a college dorm room. His invention has been on the business process side, which is a little less obvious to the public (And Bill Gates main invention was the formalization of the license).
His expertise is reliability and customer support.
I'm sure you're going to hear a lot of rejection of that hypothesis, and they're right:) They do a good enough job, especially compared to the white box guys, but they are hardly industry leaders. The fact they aren't focused on reliability means they get new technology out the door faster than those who do, which is OK because most of the IT industry has embraced the RAID (Redundant Array of Independant Devices) concept for high availability instead of the much harder AYEOB, All Your Eggs in One Basket, method.
A more useful change would be to speed up their metabolism, or reduce the inclination to snack on fatty foods.
Really no need to speed up the metabolism (mmm, fever). All you need to do is short out the fat storage mechanism, so that excess blood sugars are dumped into the urine instead of stored away. A million years of evolution through feast and famine cycles favored humans with efficient metabolisms that maximized the amount of energy they could store as fat put us where we are, the last 50 have favored those genetic freaks who can eat whatever they want and never store anything as fat.
Of course, it will be better for the race in general if its a hormone that can be eliminated during times of extended stress, say the seige of Leningrad or the Holocaust, or perhaps an enzyme that chemically breaks the blood sugar down to an safe waste product that the kidneys can safely remove.
Just because supposed "tech support" people don't know how to actually fix problems is not a limitation of Windows, it's a limitation of the people doing the hiring at support centers. Anyone who uses formatting as a "fix" instead of actually fixing should be fired...out of a cannon.
Other way around, you would be fired. Cleaning a badly infected system, solving all the little nits, that can take hours, and there's always the chance that the problem is being driven by defective hardware that is eluding the scanners. We can reimage a system in 30 minutes, less than 5 of which requires our attention. So it boils down to what the potentially lost data is worth. Many hours of work with potentially no solution (and if something is overlooked, potentially a rapid re-infection). If the data is valuable, We'll allow the drive to be mounted in another system to recover the "critical files", then nuke it.
Also, formatting isn't the fix, they tell the end user to use a recovery disk which wipes the whole hard drive instead of doing a repair install, which is easy enough to implement instead.
The repair install doesn't always fix the problem, and talking someone through it over the phone can be nightmarish (I just tried a few weeks ago). The systems support people's job is to get the system running at factory specs, the recovery option does that simply, quickly, and repeatedly. So long as they inform the consumer the impact and suggest they may wish to find a local shop that can recover the data for them (and yes, charge $60 an hour), this is acceptable.
As for backing up...mmmmm...pretty much every new PC these days comes with a CD burner. If, instead of complaining, you spent the five minutes teaching your joe user friends how to back up their data with that tool, it wouldn't be a problem, would it?
CD's are not an acceptable backup medium. Neither are DVD-R's. And many low costs systems don't have them anyway, as well as corporate systems from which admins wish to discourage people from taking sensitive corporate data home (not to mention $20 x 1,000 systems is a LOT). I can't get users to save critical data to a network drive that IS backed up. But it makes me feel better as I reformat their hard drives.:)
In MY opinion, partitioning is a relic from the ancient times of tiny drives and OSes that couldn't support anything larger than "X megs". The fact that it remains, despite it being completely uneccessary, shows how too many people in IT can't grok and move forward.
Your lack of imagination continues to impress me. I partition all my drives so when users do something stupid and fill my drives up (/home,/tmp,/var, whatever), the system still runs & boots fine. If I suspect a machine may have been comprimised, logs remain, user data remains, etc, but I can completely nuke all the binaries, etc, that may have been comprimised. I've had users fill up a 1 TB system.
Ex. The probability that two people share a birthday = 1/365, but the probability that in a group of 60 individuals that there are 2 people that share a birthday is 99.4%.
But the probability is much higher if they are twins. Selection criterea can play a big role, don't forget
What they achieved doesn't impress me at all, because it is akin to standing next to the camera and saying: "Hey, I can see what the camera sees".
The cameras they are protesting is police surveillance cameras, hidden in a public place to monitor the activities of "suspects". They are locating the general area with signal monitors, then tapping into the picture to get an exact fix. So it is significant.
Now comes the moral question. These cameras seem to be the legal equivalent of a "police stakeout" without the suspicious looking van. Disseminating information on how to locate them is roughly equivalent to spray painting "surveillance van" on all the police vehicles, putting black bars on the faces is perhaps more equivalent to standing infront of the van to block their view. Which brings up the moral questions, and doesn't seem to be useful in accomplishing the hackers claimed goals:
"It must not be cool anymore to have access to this data," said Rieger, who argued that Western societies are becoming democratically legitimized police states ruled by an unaccountable elite. "We have enough technical knowledge to turn this around; let's expose them in public, publish everything we know about them and let them know how it feels to be under surveillance."
A simple media campaign would be far more effective.
Re:Its not a DLL -its Windows, and its a feature
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Trustworthy Computing
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It will be pretty embarrassing for microsoft though -a third-party emergency fix for windows, in the same year that Vista, "Windows Secured" is due to ship.
Embarassing? This is why we need to upgrade to Vista as soon as its available. None of this lollygagging like we did with our Windows XP upgrades! NOW!
Turning to religion, the first question is, ok, if god kicked this off, where is the supporting evidence for this idea?
Simple, there is none. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy put it clearly, God requires faith, any sort of proof that god exists negates the faith requirement and poof, god vanishes in a puff of logic. I imagine this is why the Pope has rejected ID, because ID states the only way evolution could happen is because god exists and made it happened, if you accept this then evolution is proof of god's existance and hence you no longer need faith that he exists.
If your answer is that god was always here, then why can't your answer be that we were always here?
Because we are tragically frail in the grand scheme of things. I've asked around, and I can't find anyone who was alive during the civil war, so I'm pretty confident no one here pre-dates ancient summerian culture.
I'm sorry you feel a belief in science contradicts a belief in god, but I imagine that is rooted in your own aethiestic religious beliefs, .
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Let me repeat, I'm an operations guy, and BAD IMPLEMENTATION = DON'T USE. Theoretic performance that does not map to the real world is of little use outside the classroom.
Now also note: I have never said RAID 5 is generically bad, there are places where its works quite well. I use it a lot myself, after modeling the I/O I expect the volume to see. The OP was stating more "RAID 5 is the cat's pajama's, always use RAID 5", and I suspect given the ASK SLASHDOT senario that he might be better off with the RAID 1 (or 1+0 ask he stated) than RAID 5. When pushed hard with -random- I/O, I've seen orders of magnitude better performance, though I'll admit I always stick to high end hardware controllers over software implementations in those tests. And notably, my EMC is configured with RAID 5 because the battery backed cache allows confirmations of write to be sent as soon as the data is in RAM, negating a lot of the random write issues
What does he think when doctors walk in with cell phones, digital cameras, and PDA's?
Such as the fact XP has default "admin shares" of the local drives, so that copying the music anyware on your hard drive could technically be construed as "making available for distribution". This leads to some really bad places if the interpretation is that general.
That would be a non-random write. Writing data that has been relatively recently read, and noatbly the entire "stripe" would have to be in cache for both parity and data. "There are some cases where the performance is the same" is not a compelling arguement. I find the caching algorithms are far better at allowing RAID 1 to match RAID 5 read performance than letting RAID 5 match RAID 1's write performance. But perhaps thats because I'm wasting my time with real world performance metrics than theoretical models
Random small writes usually represent a small fraction of all the I/O operations in a typical file server scenario (what the OP wants to build).
It depends on what the users will be placing there and how they are using it. Are they storing digital photos in the space? Are they dumping backups there occasionaly? Then you might be right. But if he's expecting a LOT of concurrent usage, I'd expect more small random I/O's of users actively using the space. MS Office Auto saves, etc.
Well it seems you are the one who doesn't understand how write operations are commited to a RAID 5 array
What I understand is real world performance, I'm an operations guy. I keep trying to convince myself that RAID 5 should be able to compete (n-1/n efficiency is so much nicer than n/2), but when the bits hit the bus, with real data and real users, RAID 5 tanks when pushed to the limit.
Note I'm not saying RAID 1 is always better than RAID 5. But some newcomers to the world of RAID seem to think its the ultimate solution, I've seen lots of inappropriate applications of the technology.
Can we add you to the list?
RAID 5 has great READ performance, since it is effectively an n-1 stripe on read. However, WRITE performance can be abysmal, especially in random I/O situations like the one the article is proposing. In order to change a one byte on a disk, n-1 disks must be read and new parity data calculated, then two disks (data + parity) must be written to. A simple RAID 1 only requires two writes.
RAID 1 can also show gains in random reads, since a smart contoller (or linux's MD drivers) can read the data drive and the mirror drive simultaneously, meaning no time is wasted thrashing drive heads between two tracks.
I've tested RAID 5 in real world situations, and in real random I/O environments like databases the performance differences are eye popping. I use RAID 5 when efficiency counts over performance, RAID 1 (with lots of independant volumes when possible, a single FS structure can also be a bottleneck) for performance.
Otherwise known as at will employment. But even though the contract says "any reason", federal law spells out several reasons you can't be fired for. A lawsuit alledging someone was really fired for one of those reasons can be a pain, so HR usually want a good solid reason for firing before they'll let you fire anyone.
The article seems to focus on the "overgrown technologist", seems he's the kind of boss that will go away in 6 months to a year and be happier for it; a better article would be how to deal with an abusive boss that upper management likes. They are often blind to the negative impact a boss like this can have on an organization.
Why? If I invent a better moustrap, should I be granted exclusive rights to produce the moustrap for life? This is not to say I can't make money producing widgets all my life, but at some point my exclusive control goes away. Can you give a single reason why an entity should be given exclusive control over a creative work for such a long time (50+ years). Work with significant historical value can get lost to time because of this.
Your solutions are basically "keep producing or die". That's nonsense.
Strawman arguement. A 5 year copyright limit does not prevent an artist from continuing to make money from a work after it expires, just that somebody else can sing my song, reproduce my content, etc., without having to track me down (often the biggest issue) and getting my permission.
For the record, I used it for printing, and it rocks. No messing with cables, I walk to the printer room, point my laptop the right way, and hit print. I now also use it to download my workout data from my Polar Heart Monitor. Of course, you obviously don't know me...
Or just buy the new FM tuner remote if you have a nano or 5G iPod iPod Radio Remote
Reminds me of a story about Monty Python & the Holy Grail. They had no idea what peasants did on the Middle Ages (they are commedienes, not historians) so they just had they play in the mud for the most part. Given most "primitive" tribes are fairly clean relative to the common caveman image, it seems more likely that some movie maker in the 30's just decided cavemen should be dirty and grunt, and every portrayal since then has its roots in that original image. The fact there might be some truth in it (god knows I've met dirty grunters in modern homo sapiens) doesn't make it an acurate portrayal.
But the consumer is interested in getting exactly the computer they wanted quickly and at a very low cost. They don't care how it gets done, but they do care that it gets done. If it weren't for Dell driving the industry to lower prices, computers would cost hundreds more, the market would be smaller (higher prices = smaller market), etc. Sure, someone would eventually push costs lower, but the fact is Dell is consistently leading the push, and when the market slows down and competitors start thinking of raising costs to recover profitability, Dell announces price cuts to drive competitors out of business. Consumers ARE interested.
It was not his account he was using to access it, but rather an auxilary "Admin-level" card he stole. He was in charge of admin-ing the SecureID tokens, and had issued "spare" or "loaner" tokens. Bad security policy yes, but perhaps they outsourced his job because he made stupid policy decisions. Perhasp they should have done a full audit when he was let go, but in large companies this can be extremely difficult and disruptive, and still doesn't cover all the potential backdoors/traps/trojans a malicious admin could lay. The reality is you trust professionals to do whast right, they were already ahead of the game using token based authentication, its impossible for him to have a co-workers password
Blaming the victim is always bad policy, and you should feel no remorse for a criminal who has put IT professionals in a bad light. This wasn't one stupid momment, it was a series of really dumb decisions.
1. Steal SecureID token from company you no longer work for
2. Access (9 times at least!) former company's private network
3. Vandalize former comapny by deleting data
Personally, I'd feel fine if the company added lost productivity to the toll, not just for the manager, but for any projects that were delayed as a result of his criminal behavior, etc. This idiot got off light, don't be an idiot yourself and sympathize with him.
Not sure how to respond because I don't know what you mean. I know the difference between gigabit and gigabyte, but I'm not sure how it relates to my concerns.
Are you concerned that I mentioned the 4GB address limit and want to point out that 16Gb is less than 4 GB? I realize that, and also realise that multiple chips are often used together, and that his computer already had RAM in needed for running his web browser, etc. TFA was about these chips replacing hard drives, so staying on-topic those are two reasons why RAM is not a viable alternative.
The OP stated he would use them for swap. This could have been a joke because flash does not do well in an extensive rewriting environment like swap, or he could have been serious because swap is one area that would see a lot of benefit from fast random I/O.
The grandparent responded to this that he'd rather just use RAM. Now, you could thing he was arguing for using a "ramdisk" for swap (which is faster still, and doesn't suffer the re-write issues of flash), and my "data is lost when power is lost" is something of a non-issue in that use. Or he could have ben cracking a joke about using a RAMdisk for swap, the place you put stuff when you run out of RAM (ie its just a wacky idea, though some bad memory models made this a good idea in the past).
Of course, TFA is also kind of silly because flash chips have long been used as a substitute for hard drives in systems. The Pix 515 is a BX based 166Mhz PC with its OS on a flash chip, just as an example, not to mention just about every PDA I've owned over the last 5 years. But its a press release you you sort of expect that.
Ok, the population of the US is only 295 million, so the original economics ($1 downloads resulting in $200M income is insane, even if you account for non-US sales.) Look at the costs of producing a movie, then deduct the cost of the current duplication and distribution model, I can't imagine it being $1M even on a massively distributed blockbuster, and in the proposed model you still have distribution costs (servers, bandwidth, etc. How many users will object to the movie companies stealing their bandwidth if they use Bittorrent type distribution?). So lets get crazy and assume 3x more people spend that dollar (The cost has nothing to do with whether or not I see a movie on a given weekend, and if I go I bring a date, so watching at home via download means 2 former sales were lost, so my 3x more "spenders" corresponds to at least a 6x bigger audience who wish to spend 2 hours sitting around watching that box in their living room (assuming they have all bothered hook up some sort of download system to their comfy viewing screen (and not gathered around their 15" computer screen).
So, 6x more viewers results in 3x more buys results in about 1/3rd the income. Say a $30M movie now only costs $29M, the "average" movie barely makes 10% (movie studios are not crazy money makers, why else would they be going out of business, or not going nuts on the stock market?). So We'll estimate the $30M movie would have made $33M, but now will make $11M. So we need to find a way to make the movie for $10M to keep our margins. Well, you can strip out advertising costs (US jobs in media and agencies), but then you risk further shrinking you market (you're trying to attract 6x more viewers to hit this # remember). You could pay the actors less (with lots of secondary economic effects), or use no-name actors (and risk shrinking your market, hiring Tom Hanks has as much to do with advertising as acting ability). You can make less lavish sets (employ few technicians), spend less on wardrobe (fewer designers, costumers), shoot fewer retakes (shorter production schedules means less work overall). And lets not forget the loss of theater jobs.
Not that I'm assuming some sort of perfect DRM so that after I watch the movie Friday I can't give it to my freinds and let them watch (expanding the "viewers/buyer ratio" from my initial 2 to 4 or 6 or 10,000 (when the initial buyer puts the $1 download up on a P2P network).
Can't really cite examples, because shockingly almost no markets have chosen to self destruct in this way by suddenly slashing income and devaluing their product so massively.
1. Unless you are running a 64 bit system, you can only address 4GB
2. When the power goes out, you'll need to reinstall your system
Go to business school, you'll get an earful of Micheal Dell because all of his innovations are in the production process, Just in Time manufacturing, mass customization, no inventory, started from a college dorm room. His invention has been on the business process side, which is a little less obvious to the public (And Bill Gates main invention was the formalization of the license).
His expertise is reliability and customer support.
I'm sure you're going to hear a lot of rejection of that hypothesis, and they're right :) They do a good enough job, especially compared to the white box guys, but they are hardly industry leaders. The fact they aren't focused on reliability means they get new technology out the door faster than those who do, which is OK because most of the IT industry has embraced the RAID (Redundant Array of Independant Devices) concept for high availability instead of the much harder AYEOB, All Your Eggs in One Basket, method.
Really no need to speed up the metabolism (mmm, fever). All you need to do is short out the fat storage mechanism, so that excess blood sugars are dumped into the urine instead of stored away. A million years of evolution through feast and famine cycles favored humans with efficient metabolisms that maximized the amount of energy they could store as fat put us where we are, the last 50 have favored those genetic freaks who can eat whatever they want and never store anything as fat.
Of course, it will be better for the race in general if its a hormone that can be eliminated during times of extended stress, say the seige of Leningrad or the Holocaust, or perhaps an enzyme that chemically breaks the blood sugar down to an safe waste product that the kidneys can safely remove.
Unfortunately, no. The thing topped out at 104F, he'd be soggy and limp, no, let me rephrase that...
Better stick with Hufu for now.
Other way around, you would be fired. Cleaning a badly infected system, solving all the little nits, that can take hours, and there's always the chance that the problem is being driven by defective hardware that is eluding the scanners. We can reimage a system in 30 minutes, less than 5 of which requires our attention. So it boils down to what the potentially lost data is worth. Many hours of work with potentially no solution (and if something is overlooked, potentially a rapid re-infection). If the data is valuable, We'll allow the drive to be mounted in another system to recover the "critical files", then nuke it.
Also, formatting isn't the fix, they tell the end user to use a recovery disk which wipes the whole hard drive instead of doing a repair install, which is easy enough to implement instead.
The repair install doesn't always fix the problem, and talking someone through it over the phone can be nightmarish (I just tried a few weeks ago). The systems support people's job is to get the system running at factory specs, the recovery option does that simply, quickly, and repeatedly. So long as they inform the consumer the impact and suggest they may wish to find a local shop that can recover the data for them (and yes, charge $60 an hour), this is acceptable.
As for backing up...mmmmm...pretty much every new PC these days comes with a CD burner. If, instead of complaining, you spent the five minutes teaching your joe user friends how to back up their data with that tool, it wouldn't be a problem, would it?
CD's are not an acceptable backup medium. Neither are DVD-R's. And many low costs systems don't have them anyway, as well as corporate systems from which admins wish to discourage people from taking sensitive corporate data home (not to mention $20 x 1,000 systems is a LOT). I can't get users to save critical data to a network drive that IS backed up. But it makes me feel better as I reformat their hard drives. :)
In MY opinion, partitioning is a relic from the ancient times of tiny drives and OSes that couldn't support anything larger than "X megs". The fact that it remains, despite it being completely uneccessary, shows how too many people in IT can't grok and move forward.
Your lack of imagination continues to impress me. I partition all my drives so when users do something stupid and fill my drives up (/home, /tmp, /var, whatever), the system still runs & boots fine. If I suspect a machine may have been comprimised, logs remain, user data remains, etc, but I can completely nuke all the binaries, etc, that may have been comprimised. I've had users fill up a 1 TB system.
But the probability is much higher if they are twins. Selection criterea can play a big role, don't forget
The cameras they are protesting is police surveillance cameras, hidden in a public place to monitor the activities of "suspects". They are locating the general area with signal monitors, then tapping into the picture to get an exact fix. So it is significant.
Now comes the moral question. These cameras seem to be the legal equivalent of a "police stakeout" without the suspicious looking van. Disseminating information on how to locate them is roughly equivalent to spray painting "surveillance van" on all the police vehicles, putting black bars on the faces is perhaps more equivalent to standing infront of the van to block their view. Which brings up the moral questions, and doesn't seem to be useful in accomplishing the hackers claimed goals:
A simple media campaign would be far more effective.
Embarassing? This is why we need to upgrade to Vista as soon as its available. None of this lollygagging like we did with our Windows XP upgrades! NOW!
Simple, there is none. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy put it clearly, God requires faith, any sort of proof that god exists negates the faith requirement and poof, god vanishes in a puff of logic. I imagine this is why the Pope has rejected ID, because ID states the only way evolution could happen is because god exists and made it happened, if you accept this then evolution is proof of god's existance and hence you no longer need faith that he exists.
If your answer is that god was always here, then why can't your answer be that we were always here?
Because we are tragically frail in the grand scheme of things. I've asked around, and I can't find anyone who was alive during the civil war, so I'm pretty confident no one here pre-dates ancient summerian culture.
I'm sorry you feel a belief in science contradicts a belief in god, but I imagine that is rooted in your own aethiestic religious beliefs, .