RAID 5 might be fine for bargain-basement web hosts and your home file server, but no production environment that I've ever had the pleasure of working in has ever run any kind of RAID 5. Even the small risk that you might lose the parity if a disk goes down during a write is not acceptable, and rebuild time for an "ideal" failure makes it even less so. We either run straight up RAID 1 (with hot spares) for systems that aren't I/O bound, or 1+0 when disk performance is an issue.
By definition, they're not paying taxes. If they are, great.. But I'm afraid those few that may be ponying-up via forged credentials are sucking more out of the economy then they give back.
Have you got any kind of citation for that? Because you're wrong - it's a lot more than a "few."
Hint: If you get a job with a fake SSN/forged ID, your employer will withhold taxes anyway, and send them to the government. The Social Security Administration, for instance, gets an extra $7 Billion per year from illegals who will never see any of the benefits they're paying for.
We've got this new admin at work. He's not a Debian guy. He's not a Linux guy. He's not a Windows guy. Hell, he's not even really a computer guy. Frankly, I don't know why the hell we hired him. I've caught him messing around as root on production boxes on several occasions.
"Hey, why are you logged in as root?"
"I'm trying to learn vi."
"Well STOP IT."
A couple of weeks ago, he came up to my cube and asked me a question:
"So, to upgrade from Woody to Sarge, I just change the the repos, and do an apt-get upgrade?"
I was busy doing something else, and only half paying attention, so I said, "Yeah, but it's dist-upgrade."
It took about two minutes for the light to go off above my head, and I DIVED over the half dozen cubicles that separated us "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
Yep. He was about to hit the enter key to "upgrade" a production, HIGHLY CUSTOMIZED*, mostly undocumented Woody webserver, without checking any of the configs (how was he supposed to know what to look for) or things like versions of Perl against our in-house apps.
He just looked at me with the misty-eyed incomprehension of a cow at a slaughterhouse that's about to get a nail to the brain.
Like I said, I don't know why we hired him.**
* Not my fault. Somebody made the decision to allow the developers install the production boxes to fit their apps, rather than writing their apps to work on the standard installation. I love this place.
** Actually, I do. Small company, now with extra nepotism!
The Rega P1 is supposed to be around $350, cartridge and arm included, though I've not found out much about it other than the product announcement and speculation in various audiophile forums. Once I've got some dough to unload, I'm going to look a little harder at it.
In a couple of weeks, we'll see a/. article about how four Mozilla developers have mysteriously disappeared, followed shortly thereafter by one about how they've been found in the trunk of Ballmer's car.
...Shenzhen and Guangdong, where per capita income are the highest of China at above US$6,000.
That does not mean what you think it means. Hint: google "6000 dollars in RMB." I actually saw the same article earlier and threw it out, because the income figures were twice as high as anything else I found.
I can't hang any company out to dry for their behavior in a foreign county without knowing what the local customs allow or dictate, except in obvious cases of abuse. Do the remainder of residents living in Shenzhen work 10-hour days? 12? How many days a week are they working? How about the Apple workers, how many days a week do they work? We just don't know, not from this article.
Which is what I was trying to do with the income figures. The G-whatever-P tossed in the meaningless canard about the relative cost of living, when even TF-Apple-sympathetic-A admitted that 50 bucks is a pretty shitty monthly wage.
I don't think the factory-to-factory comparison is any more valid than the factory-to-everybody comparison. If most of the factories in Shenzhen are sweatshops, then wages are going to be low. Even with your higher figure, they're only 1/3 of the median for the area. That's dirt poor.
The thing to remember about the PRC is that it's this wierd mix of robber-baron oligarchy and jack-booted authoritarian oppression. These women are most likely not from the area. They've probably been bussed in from their home villages somewhere in the countryside, and it's entirely possible that they don't even speak the same dialect as Shenzen natives. There's no way for them to just find another job.
It's some fucked-up hybrid of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland and migrant labor in the US.
Shenzhen. Per-capita disposable income of Shenzhen's urban residents continued to climb in 2003, hitting 25,935.84 yuan, up 4 percent year on year, according to data from the Shenzhen Bureau of Statistics.
Note that your source only includes factory workers. If everybody in Shenzhen made $85 a month, a low cost of living might be an excuse. But they don't, so it isn't.
Uhhh... yeah. That argument barely holds water in the US, and you're trying to apply it to people living in an authoritarian kleptocracy where you until recently had to get permission from the government to move anywhere?
If it's such a sweet deal, why don't you go work there?
Does the article state what conditions are like there? Do they even try?
Yes. Did you?
FTFA:
According to the report (paraphrased here by Macworld UK), Foxconn's giant Longhua plant employs 200,000 workers, who work 15-hour days but are paid just $50 a month -- MISERABLE BY EVEN CHINA'S STANDARDS. It claims they work and live in the plant, in dormitories housing 100 people, and outside visitors are forbidden.
The Longhua plant is in Shenzhen, where the median annual household income is about 24000 RMB, or about $3000 US, or $250/month. So they're getting paid 1/5 of the median household income for the area, before their employer takes half of it for living expenses. Not to mention they're working 15 hour days, probably 6 days/week - or 4500 hours/year. In absolute terms, they're getting paid about $0.13 an hour.
The median annual household income for the US is about $50k. 20% of that is 10k, or $800/month. ($10k/year)/(4500 hours) = $2.22.
So, in relative terms, the people who made your ipod are getting paid the equivalent of $2.22 an hour, before the employer takes half for room and board.
If you really wanna know, they used to be private networks that handled routing various EDI docs from customers between and among themselves. Think of it as application-layer routing. I dump a text file with a header that says "this goes to the Acme widget company" out on my VAN's server, and they route it to Acme's VAN, who then routes it to Acme.
From what I can tell, most of them now do this over the Internet, but I suppose there are a handful that still use private lines.
You usually get a bunch of other tracking and analysis tools (hence the "Value-Added"), but most of what they do is shuttling EDI documents around.
We still use one, but that's because I work at one of those SaaS-places, and 95% of what we process is EDI. The connection is nothing special, though; we just put and get text files up to their SFTP box. Since most places run their own EDI translation tools in-house, it's not conceptually difficult to cut out VANs, using AS2 or AS3 (Encrypted EDI over HTTP/FTP, eg Cyclone or Templar), XML, or straight up FTP. Since most places that use EDI are almost conservative by definition, though, the VANs can still make money.
Your parent was talking about the iPod directory structure not the iTunes one.
So was I. I suppose I should have been more clear - I'm talking about the iTunesDB on the iPod. There's no reason that they can't both allow drag/drop and enable a local database for more "advanced" track manipulation.
That's the primary upside of Rockbox. At least, to me. If I were going to buy and iPod. Which I'm not.
So, to recap: I don't like iTunes as a music player, music store, CD ripper, CD burner, or hardware interface. Is there anything else I forgot?
Yeah, it sucks that the directories aren't in human-readable formats on the ipod, but there are plenty of third party apps to pull songs off an ipod. I keep the installer for a windows and mac version stored on my ipod.
That's why it sucks, pretty much. Ogg support I can live without, but REQUIRING some giant, bloated interface do a device that shouldn't need anything more than a mass storage driver is stupid. There is absolutely no reason to force the user to go through the iTunesDB for basic playback functionality. It's fine if they wanna require it for smart playlists and all that other shit, but to just play songs? Fuck 'em.
Get it? I don't like iTunes. I'm perfectly capable of managing my songs with my directory structure and a few playlists, and I'm perfectly happy with my small, streamlined audio tools that I can link together in various interesting ways. And you know what? My opnion is 100% correct, because it's what works for me. The same goes for your opinion, but only for you.
I suspect that many other *nix users feel the same way. We're not used to giant, monolithic programs that attempt to be the alpha and the omega of our music-listening (or anything) needs, and we resent being forced (so to speak) to change that approach. Except for Emacs.
Full disclosure: I own a Shuffle, but I use it as a thumb drive that also happens to play mp3s. And no, I don't use iTunes.
What the parent said.
Actually, OpenVPN will really only work if you can garuntee that you're the only people who will ever be using the link.
If you're ever going to have to interoperate with any outside trading partners, though, you're stuck with an IPSec solution. If you decide to go that route, feel free to futz around with OpenS/WAN, or just buy a bunch of PIX 500's on ebay.
What are you talking about? The entire article is fucking astroturf for the ISPs.
A sample paragraph, emphasis mine:
It centers on whether broadband providers will be free to design their networks as they see fit and enjoy the latitude to prioritize certain types of traffic--such as streaming video--over others. (In an interview last week with CNET News.com, Verizon Chief Technology Officer Mark Wegleitner said prioritization is necessary to make such services economically viable.)
The rest of it is essentially laying out an emotionally evocative argument for the "free market" and against government regulation. I'm suprised they even bothered to throw in the halfassed "They're breaking teh internets!!!!~1" quotes from the Democrats that they DID manage to find space for.
I don't know which ISPs CNET intends to "partner" with, but they're sure as hell a video content provider, and they obviously have a dog in this fight. I don't think I've ever seen an ostensibly straight news story from an ostensibly objective tech news site where the corporate bias was so blatant.
Shit, they closed with a quote from Grover Fucking Norquist. That's just lame.
The GNU tools are particularly unremarkable in that they are just free implementations of tools that already existed.
What are you smoking? My other primary Unix is AIX, and I've got just about everythin aliased to the GNU stuff in/opt/freeware/bin/. The IBM shit, with the possible exception of the C compiler, is absolutely painful to use.
It's like saying, oh, I dunno, oowriter is just another implementation of ed.
He took it to one of the local rip-off shops who charged him $200 to clean it. Arrrghh!
There there. Dad paying Geeksquad $200 to clean spyware > Dad paying me $0 to clean spyware. Or doesn't your family view you as their 24/7/365, on-site, FREE tech support service?
"The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk... and with a tiny little screen," Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in suburban Washington.
...
Before his critique, Gates showed off a new "ultra-mobile computer" which runs Microsoft Windows on a seven-inch (17.78-centimeter) touch screen.
Those machines are expected to sell for between $599 and $999, Microsoft said at the product launch last week.
Indeed. I mean, how are poor, illiterate masses supposed to install Office (tm) on those things? Or run Windows Media Player(tm)?
Clearly, since the only reason for anybody to use a computer is to provide a justification for spending money on Microsoft products, the sub-$100 idea is just goofy.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn. You should have called me. My employer just tossed a ton of 704's that we were using in production as recently as six months ago. F50's, too.
I'm talking about RAID 5 vs. RAID 1*.
RAID 5 might be fine for bargain-basement web hosts and your home file server, but no production environment that I've ever had the pleasure of working in has ever run any kind of RAID 5. Even the small risk that you might lose the parity if a disk goes down during a write is not acceptable, and rebuild time for an "ideal" failure makes it even less so. We either run straight up RAID 1 (with hot spares) for systems that aren't I/O bound, or 1+0 when disk performance is an issue.
You sure about that? In every production server environment I've ever worked in, downtime is a helluva lot more expensive than disks.
Have you got any kind of citation for that? Because you're wrong - it's a lot more than a "few."
Hint: If you get a job with a fake SSN/forged ID, your employer will withhold taxes anyway, and send them to the government. The Social Security Administration, for instance, gets an extra $7 Billion per year from illegals who will never see any of the benefits they're paying for.
We've got this new admin at work. He's not a Debian guy. He's not a Linux guy. He's not a Windows guy. Hell, he's not even really a computer guy. Frankly, I don't know why the hell we hired him. I've caught him messing around as root on production boxes on several occasions.
"Hey, why are you logged in as root?"
"I'm trying to learn vi."
"Well STOP IT."
A couple of weeks ago, he came up to my cube and asked me a question:
"So, to upgrade from Woody to Sarge, I just change the the repos, and do an apt-get upgrade?"
I was busy doing something else, and only half paying attention, so I said, "Yeah, but it's dist-upgrade."
It took about two minutes for the light to go off above my head, and I DIVED over the half dozen cubicles that separated us "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
Yep. He was about to hit the enter key to "upgrade" a production, HIGHLY CUSTOMIZED*, mostly undocumented Woody webserver, without checking any of the configs (how was he supposed to know what to look for) or things like versions of Perl against our in-house apps.
He just looked at me with the misty-eyed incomprehension of a cow at a slaughterhouse that's about to get a nail to the brain.
Like I said, I don't know why we hired him.**
* Not my fault. Somebody made the decision to allow the developers install the production boxes to fit their apps, rather than writing their apps to work on the standard installation. I love this place.
** Actually, I do. Small company, now with extra nepotism!
The Rega P1 is supposed to be around $350, cartridge and arm included, though I've not found out much about it other than the product announcement and speculation in various audiophile forums. Once I've got some dough to unload, I'm going to look a little harder at it.
Good thing I'm not currently carrying any Bluetooth devices. No ads for me? Sweeet.
What's that, you say? It can detect the court ordered electronic monitoring device attached to my ankle? Shit!
In a couple of weeks, we'll see a /. article about how four Mozilla developers have mysteriously disappeared, followed shortly thereafter by one about how they've been found in the trunk of Ballmer's car.
Forget about the licensing costs... how about the poor slobs who had to to pay for three days of parking in greater NY at the daily rate. Ouch.
- 2.0 GHz Core Duo
- 1GB RAM
- 120GB HDD
- 1440x900 14"
- 9-cell battery
- XP MCE, which'll be relegated to a 5GB partition. The rest will be Ubuntu.
The equivalent white Macbook, with a smaller screen and weaker battery, runs at $1650.Makes sense to me. Totally.
That does not mean what you think it means. Hint: google "6000 dollars in RMB." I actually saw the same article earlier and threw it out, because the income figures were twice as high as anything else I found.
I can't hang any company out to dry for their behavior in a foreign county without knowing what the local customs allow or dictate, except in obvious cases of abuse. Do the remainder of residents living in Shenzhen work 10-hour days? 12? How many days a week are they working? How about the Apple workers, how many days a week do they work? We just don't know, not from this article.
Which is what I was trying to do with the income figures. The G-whatever-P tossed in the meaningless canard about the relative cost of living, when even TF-Apple-sympathetic-A admitted that 50 bucks is a pretty shitty monthly wage.
I don't think the factory-to-factory comparison is any more valid than the factory-to-everybody comparison. If most of the factories in Shenzhen are sweatshops, then wages are going to be low. Even with your higher figure, they're only 1/3 of the median for the area. That's dirt poor.
The thing to remember about the PRC is that it's this wierd mix of robber-baron oligarchy and jack-booted authoritarian oppression. These women are most likely not from the area. They've probably been bussed in from their home villages somewhere in the countryside, and it's entirely possible that they don't even speak the same dialect as Shenzen natives. There's no way for them to just find another job.
It's some fucked-up hybrid of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland and migrant labor in the US.
Note that your source only includes factory workers. If everybody in Shenzhen made $85 a month, a low cost of living might be an excuse. But they don't, so it isn't.
So, why don't they work somewhere else?
Uhhh... yeah. That argument barely holds water in the US, and you're trying to apply it to people living in an authoritarian kleptocracy where you until recently had to get permission from the government to move anywhere?
If it's such a sweet deal, why don't you go work there?
The factory in question is in Shenzhen, which ain't fucking cheap. It's a suburb of HK, fer chrissakes!
Also, this, from the GP, is just goofy:
Also 15 hours/day doesn't sound bad. My wife's family in Vietnam do that easily and they are some of the happiest people I know.
Who wouldn't want to get paid next to nothing to fondle iPods all day. Ooooh... shiny plastic... it's just like working at the Apple Store!
Yes. Did you?
FTFA:
The Longhua plant is in Shenzhen, where the median annual household income is about 24000 RMB, or about $3000 US, or $250/month. So they're getting paid 1/5 of the median household income for the area, before their employer takes half of it for living expenses. Not to mention they're working 15 hour days, probably 6 days/week - or 4500 hours/year. In absolute terms, they're getting paid about $0.13 an hour.
The median annual household income for the US is about $50k. 20% of that is 10k, or $800/month. ($10k/year)/(4500 hours) = $2.22.
So, in relative terms, the people who made your ipod are getting paid the equivalent of $2.22 an hour, before the employer takes half for room and board.
In concluseion: you're wrong. Apple sucks.
From what I can tell, most of them now do this over the Internet, but I suppose there are a handful that still use private lines.
You usually get a bunch of other tracking and analysis tools (hence the "Value-Added"), but most of what they do is shuttling EDI documents around.
We still use one, but that's because I work at one of those SaaS-places, and 95% of what we process is EDI. The connection is nothing special, though; we just put and get text files up to their SFTP box. Since most places run their own EDI translation tools in-house, it's not conceptually difficult to cut out VANs, using AS2 or AS3 (Encrypted EDI over HTTP/FTP, eg Cyclone or Templar), XML, or straight up FTP. Since most places that use EDI are almost conservative by definition, though, the VANs can still make money.
So was I. I suppose I should have been more clear - I'm talking about the iTunesDB on the iPod. There's no reason that they can't both allow drag/drop and enable a local database for more "advanced" track manipulation.
That's the primary upside of Rockbox. At least, to me. If I were going to buy and iPod. Which I'm not.
So, to recap: I don't like iTunes as a music player, music store, CD ripper, CD burner, or hardware interface. Is there anything else I forgot?
That's why it sucks, pretty much. Ogg support I can live without, but REQUIRING some giant, bloated interface do a device that shouldn't need anything more than a mass storage driver is stupid. There is absolutely no reason to force the user to go through the iTunesDB for basic playback functionality. It's fine if they wanna require it for smart playlists and all that other shit, but to just play songs? Fuck 'em.
Get it? I don't like iTunes. I'm perfectly capable of managing my songs with my directory structure and a few playlists, and I'm perfectly happy with my small, streamlined audio tools that I can link together in various interesting ways. And you know what? My opnion is 100% correct, because it's what works for me. The same goes for your opinion, but only for you.
I suspect that many other *nix users feel the same way. We're not used to giant, monolithic programs that attempt to be the alpha and the omega of our music-listening (or anything) needs, and we resent being forced (so to speak) to change that approach. Except for Emacs.
Full disclosure: I own a Shuffle, but I use it as a thumb drive that also happens to play mp3s. And no, I don't use iTunes.
Dude, seriosly. Pay the phone company the extra five bucks a month for an IP at each site. You'll thank me later.
What the parent said. Actually, OpenVPN will really only work if you can garuntee that you're the only people who will ever be using the link. If you're ever going to have to interoperate with any outside trading partners, though, you're stuck with an IPSec solution. If you decide to go that route, feel free to futz around with OpenS/WAN, or just buy a bunch of PIX 500's on ebay.
A sample paragraph, emphasis mine:
The rest of it is essentially laying out an emotionally evocative argument for the "free market" and against government regulation. I'm suprised they even bothered to throw in the halfassed "They're breaking teh internets!!!!~1" quotes from the Democrats that they DID manage to find space for.
I don't know which ISPs CNET intends to "partner" with, but they're sure as hell a video content provider, and they obviously have a dog in this fight. I don't think I've ever seen an ostensibly straight news story from an ostensibly objective tech news site where the corporate bias was so blatant.
Shit, they closed with a quote from Grover Fucking Norquist. That's just lame.
What are you smoking? My other primary Unix is AIX, and I've got just about everythin aliased to the GNU stuff in /opt/freeware/bin/. The IBM shit, with the possible exception of the C compiler, is absolutely painful to use.
It's like saying, oh, I dunno, oowriter is just another implementation of ed.
There there. Dad paying Geeksquad $200 to clean spyware > Dad paying me $0 to clean spyware. Or doesn't your family view you as their 24/7/365, on-site, FREE tech support service?
Seriously. Can we trade dads?
Indeed. I mean, how are poor, illiterate masses supposed to install Office (tm) on those things? Or run Windows Media Player(tm)?
Clearly, since the only reason for anybody to use a computer is to provide a justification for spending money on Microsoft products, the sub-$100 idea is just goofy.