What I have never understood is why servers virtually always have AC power supplies.
For low voltages I don't see any problem with DC but AFAICR at higher voltages DC is more dangerous - a shock from an AC supply causes you to let go quickly, a shock from a DC supply (ISTR) causes the muscles in your hand to contract so that you can't let go.
However, these days we have so many low voltage DC systems (even in homes) that running a 12 or 18v DC supply around your office/home/datacentre sounds like a good idea. You still have to convert it to the voltages you need (usually 12v, 5v, 3.3v, and maybe a few others) but I can't help thinking that building a DC-DC converter for these low voltages would probably be cheaper and easier than a full 240v AC switched mode PSU for each device. (low power devices can even get away with using cheapo linear regulators).
Of course I'd still like some power regulation in each device since I don't want a power spike in the low voltage circuit blowing every device.
The question isn't whether it's good to keep both cool. The question is, which makes more financial sense? Cooling the whole room? Spending the money to purchase servers with a low heat-to-computation ratio?
You don't need to cool the whole room - you could just cool the cabinets. Most cabinets have doors and sides, an open bottom and fans at the top. So you can blow cold air up the inside of the datacabinet (which is what most datacentres do anyway) and take the air from the top to recycle it with reasonably minimal air (and hence heat) exchange with the rest of the room.
And on top of that, who says we want to interact with Microsoft's code to begin with?
I guess some people do, otherwise noone would've written the reasonably large amount of code designed specifically for interacting with Microsoft's software (and yes, there is a lot).
There's a big difference with hardware reverse-engineering: I own it. I bought the hardware, it's on my machine
Umm, and that's different how to "I own it, I bought the software, it's on my machine"?
Sorry, but I don't see a significant difference between reverse engineering some hardware that you bought and reverse engineering some software that you bought (or were given for free).
There might be a legal issue if he disassembled the code...because most license agreements explicitly forbid disassembly, a court may say he used improper means to get the necessary information. That is, even though reverse engineering is legal, you can't violate other obligations.
Most licences prohibit "reverse engineering" too - it's just not enforcable since the local laws explicitly allow reverse engineering. Of course IANAL so I can't tell you if the lagal "reverse engineering for interoperability purposes" also include disassembly. I would think it did.
A less trivial (and possibly more legal) undertaking would have been to code a new framework from scratch
1. There is no legal problem here - it's completely legal to reverse engineer for interoperability. 2. How exactly is your "new framework" going to interact with existing (closed) systems? Or are you expecting the likes of Microsoft to implement a new open protocol so they can interact with the FOSS community?
we complain that MS "embraces and extends" all the time -- how is this any different?
Microsoft does "embrace and extend" on well defined open protocols and screws everyone over because of their market position (which basically forces everyone else to adopt their extensions). This is simply "embracing" (not extending) a propriatory system so we can interoperate with it - no protocols are being broken here.
I much prefer *actual* open source projects. Not open source derived from disassembly of closed source.
Like it or not, when interacting with propriatory systems you have to reverse engineer them because the propriators are sure as hell not going to give you the specs. The same is true of hardware drivers, etc. (an aweful lot of the hardware drivers in Linux were reverse engineered by looking at how the Windows drivers interacted with the hardware). How would you suggest doing it?
The way she put it was that in the US, if the TV Guide says a show is going to be on at 10am, it will be on at 10am precisely. In Australia, the scheduling is a pretty loose arrangement. There's little chance your show will come on at the scheduled time and no guarantee it will be shown at all.
In the UK pretty much all the channels stick to the schedule... the exception being the BBC channels which frequently postpone stuff or (worse) show it 15 minutes later than scheduled (so I end up videoing 15 minutes of crap and then missing the last 15 minutes of the show I actually wanted to watch).
I will use Javascript to do everything, even things that can be done with plain HTML like opening a new window
Opening a new window has been depricated in XHTML - the only way to do it is JavaShit. Which is good because I hate webmasters assuming I want links opened in a new window (I almost never do - if I did I would've clicked "open in new window"). Unfortunately it's bad coz they'll just use Javascript instead.:(
How hot do they get? As of now I am only using 5400RPM ATA Samsung drives and they are cool (30is degrees C) and quiet (neither spin nor access noise).
The Baracuda's are 7200rpm drives - the machine is in my living room with "quiet" components (so there isn't a huge amount of air flow through the case anyway). smartctl says the drive temperature is 45 degrees C ATM:
So not exactly cool, but given that limited airflow it's not bad. The drive isn't currently bolted in either - it's just sitting on the bottom of the case so I guess the contact area to dissipate heat to the case is less than if it was bolted into the drive bay.
This I can confirm. I lost two of them already. And they are really noisy.
We lost a reasonably large number at work and have since switched to Seagates too. I originally had an 80 gig Maxtor in my MythTV machine as well but it failed after 9 months, I sent it back to the retailer under warranty and got my cash back, which I promptly spent on the 120 gig Seagate drive costing what I origionally paid for the 80.:)
Why is this important to me? I can't stand those 7200RPM disks on the desktop. Too noisy.
The 120 gig Seagate Baracuda in my MythTV machine is quiet as... a very quiet thing... on national quiet day.
The crappy 40 gig Maxtor in my server, however, is noisy as hell and I long for the day when it dies to give me an excuse to replace the damned thing.:) (Shouldn't be long - maxtors don't seem to take long to fail spectacularly in my experience).
On top of the applications, I like to RAID just about everything and backup critical data to secondary machines once in a while. I do this because backup technologies (Tape/DVD etc) have not kept pace with hard drives in terms of cost and capacity and hard drives do fail from time to time.
RAID is a good "continuation-of-service" solution (i.e. you stand a good chance of being able to continue using the system during a failure), but IMHO it's absolutely no substitute for a backup. For one, the RAID applies changes immediately - so a slip with the rm command and you've lost your data immediately instead of being able to get it back from last night's backup. Secondly, if the PSU goes boom it could take out all the drives in the RAID (I've seen it happen).
Am I the only guy on the planet who doesn't seem to need more than about 80GB?
It very much depends on what you're using your computer for. i.e. my dad stores some wordprocessing files on his machine and that's about it. Same goes for my sister (hell, she still uses floppy disks!). On the other hand, my server has a 40 gig drive in it that's got about 2 gig free most of the time - it's got a chunk of space dedicated to MP3s, another fairly large chunk of space dedicated to my digital photos, more space for large sourcecode trees I'm working on. On the occasion that I glue large panoramic photos together, 10 - 15 gig of free space is handy (when you're dealling with a large number of massive TIFFs they take up huge amounts of disk space).
Meanwhile, my MythTV box has a 120 gig hard drive in it that's full most of the time (MythTV keeps my video archive trimmed to fit on the drive by expiring old shows). And my laptop has a tiny 20 gig drive that is reasonably full most of the time since it has the operating system and a backup of my photos on it.
I think you'll find anyone who does high-res photo or video editing will want as much (fast) drive space as they can get their hands on.
With that, harddisks are completely reliable *enough*. Maybe burn a DVD of pics every once in a while, the digicam ones are pretty big. But that's it.
For digital cameras for Joe Public I think the industry needs to develop a _really_ long term and cheap storage medium. I.e. the digital equivalent of 35mm negatives that can be left on the shelf for decades without any problems. I certainly wouldn't trust any of the current technology for that: Writable optical media (CD-R's, etc) has a habit of degrading over time, hard drives eventually die spectacularly (and are rather big for leaving on the shelf) and Flash is quite expensive and I'm not sure I'd trust leaving it untouched for decades. A write-once card the size of Compact Flash that's designed specifically for long-term storage would be nice. (Long term meaning over 100 years I think).
I keep all my photos on my server and they get regular backups to optical media, but "normal people" don't want to do that - they want a cheap memory card that they can burn a set of photos to and then leave in a cupboard.
Why should the telco have to setup everything as if you'd use voice and DSL (which I gather has to be done on most systems just to GET DSL) if you were not required to use the voice?
Seems anticompetetive to me - why would (most) people switch to a VoIP provider if they're forced to pay for the POTS line anyway?
Besides, I already pay a subscription to my ISP (who in turn pay the telco, BT, for the line, hardware, etc.). So in effect I'm being made to pay for the line twice - once through the ISP for the DSL service and then again as the monthly subscription for a voice line I never use.
I'd totally love to dump my craptacualar tel-co (in my case Verizon), but still keep my DSL line, and jump fully into VoIP.
I can only hope the UK don't follow suit - Currently I have a DSL line from BT which requires me to have a POTS line too. I understand that OfCom (the UK version of the FCC) was supposed to be forcing BT to supply naked DSL some time last year but I've heard nothing more about it... A real shame coz VoIP call charges are about the same as BT's but without the monthly subscription.
IMHO requiring you to have a POTS line together with your internet connection is anticompetetive - why would (most) people switch to a VoIP provider if they're having to pay for the POTS line anyway?
I thought DSL (and dialup) already had that, and that was only an issue with cable modem.
Not from what I've seen - some ISPs filter spoofed traffic with a source address outside the ISP's network, others appear to do no filtering at all. I'm not sure if any bother to filter based on a customer's allocated network.
cuts their access (using iptables) to everything except an internal Webserver to notify them of their infection.
An additional point - the internal web server should really provide the tools to clean the infection, otherwise someone's gonna be screwed when their access to the clean up tools has been blocked. Even smarter would be to identify the infection and redirect them to a page that contains the tools and instructions for cleaning that specific infection. (Hell, for people using IE the internal webserver could exploit one of the many security holes in it and automagically clean the machine.:)
90% of the DDoS problem would be dealt with if ISPs used competent edge filtering on their networks.
Even better would be filtering as close to the customer as possible - if your DSL connection has been allocated the network 1.2.3.4/29 then all traffic from your DSL *not* coming from 1.2.3.4/29 can be filtered at the ISP end of the DSL pipe - i.e. it's filtered before it even enters the ISP network. This prevents spoofing of other users on the same ISP - any unblocked traffic would easilly be traced back to the customer who sourced it since it would *have* to come from the customer's allocated subnet.
(This stuff shouldn't really be rocket science - ISPs do traffic shaping on a per-DSL basis so there's absolutely no reason why they can't also do source address filtering on a per-DSL basis).
Re:P acronym city
on
Inside the PSP
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
PSP, P2P, PS2
Not to mention anything relating to old IBM PS/2 machines:)
The means to properly operate a computer is as far beyond the reach of the average person as is the ability to tune their car and replace the fan belt. It's not that their stupid,it's that the concepts are completely alien to them.
So when their (windows) computer breaks they can take it down to PC World and pay to get it fixed. What's the big deal?
Maybe what's needed is recommended service intervals - i.e. the manual recommends you to take your computer to a "service centre" every 12 months and pay for it's annual spyware cleanup, security updates, whatever. This would be exactly the same as a car - if you're knowledgable enough you can service it yourself and you don't _have_ to get it serviced, but if you refuse to get it serviced and it goes tits up you really can't complain.
Infact this would be better than the arrangement that cars have since most modern cars need specialist equipment to service them whereas the tools you need to "service" your computer are (mostly) freely available for anyone with enough knowledge to use.
I'm sorry, but I just don't get how people can buy a computer with no knowledge about how to use it and then complain that they have to pay someone with the knowledge to fix it. I'm afraid this is the way the Real World works - if you need something doing and you don't have the knowledge to do it yourself then you pay someone else to do it.
Especially when all they have to do is offer them chocolate before they bust them;-)
That survey is almost certainly complete rubbish - if someone came up to me in the street and offered me chocolate in exchange for my password I'd just give them a bogus password so I could get my chocolate.
They're still behind now - none of the standard windows services support v6 yet and there appears to be no way (under XPSP2) of manually configuring the IP address.
Compared to my Linux boxes, which have all but a few stubborn services running on IPv6. (I currently have to use v4 for Asterisk, Portmap and CUPS... which is stunningly bad given that CUPS is a new system but doesn't do IPv6 at all.)
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What I have never understood is why servers virtually always have AC power supplies.
For low voltages I don't see any problem with DC but AFAICR at higher voltages DC is more dangerous - a shock from an AC supply causes you to let go quickly, a shock from a DC supply (ISTR) causes the muscles in your hand to contract so that you can't let go.
However, these days we have so many low voltage DC systems (even in homes) that running a 12 or 18v DC supply around your office/home/datacentre sounds like a good idea. You still have to convert it to the voltages you need (usually 12v, 5v, 3.3v, and maybe a few others) but I can't help thinking that building a DC-DC converter for these low voltages would probably be cheaper and easier than a full 240v AC switched mode PSU for each device. (low power devices can even get away with using cheapo linear regulators).
Of course I'd still like some power regulation in each device since I don't want a power spike in the low voltage circuit blowing every device.
The question isn't whether it's good to keep both cool. The question is, which makes more financial sense? Cooling the whole room? Spending the money to purchase servers with a low heat-to-computation ratio?
You don't need to cool the whole room - you could just cool the cabinets. Most cabinets have doors and sides, an open bottom and fans at the top. So you can blow cold air up the inside of the datacabinet (which is what most datacentres do anyway) and take the air from the top to recycle it with reasonably minimal air (and hence heat) exchange with the rest of the room.
And on top of that, who says we want to interact with Microsoft's code to begin with?
I guess some people do, otherwise noone would've written the reasonably large amount of code designed specifically for interacting with Microsoft's software (and yes, there is a lot).
There's a big difference with hardware reverse-engineering: I own it. I bought the hardware, it's on my machine
Umm, and that's different how to "I own it, I bought the software, it's on my machine"?
Sorry, but I don't see a significant difference between reverse engineering some hardware that you bought and reverse engineering some software that you bought (or were given for free).
There might be a legal issue if he disassembled the code...because most license agreements explicitly forbid disassembly, a court may say he used improper means to get the necessary information. That is, even though reverse engineering is legal, you can't violate other obligations.
Most licences prohibit "reverse engineering" too - it's just not enforcable since the local laws explicitly allow reverse engineering. Of course IANAL so I can't tell you if the lagal "reverse engineering for interoperability purposes" also include disassembly. I would think it did.
Reverse engineering is legal, but have they no patents or copyrights?
Thankfully software isn't patentable in the EU (yet).
I call troll...
A less trivial (and possibly more legal) undertaking would have been to code a new framework from scratch
1. There is no legal problem here - it's completely legal to reverse engineer for interoperability.
2. How exactly is your "new framework" going to interact with existing (closed) systems? Or are you expecting the likes of Microsoft to implement a new open protocol so they can interact with the FOSS community?
we complain that MS "embraces and extends" all the time -- how is this any different?
Microsoft does "embrace and extend" on well defined open protocols and screws everyone over because of their market position (which basically forces everyone else to adopt their extensions). This is simply "embracing" (not extending) a propriatory system so we can interoperate with it - no protocols are being broken here.
I much prefer *actual* open source projects. Not open source derived from disassembly of closed source.
Like it or not, when interacting with propriatory systems you have to reverse engineer them because the propriators are sure as hell not going to give you the specs. The same is true of hardware drivers, etc. (an aweful lot of the hardware drivers in Linux were reverse engineered by looking at how the Windows drivers interacted with the hardware). How would you suggest doing it?
The way she put it was that in the US, if the TV Guide says a show is going to be on at 10am, it will be on at 10am precisely. In Australia, the scheduling is a pretty loose arrangement. There's little chance your show will come on at the scheduled time and no guarantee it will be shown at all.
In the UK pretty much all the channels stick to the schedule... the exception being the BBC channels which frequently postpone stuff or (worse) show it 15 minutes later than scheduled (so I end up videoing 15 minutes of crap and then missing the last 15 minutes of the show I actually wanted to watch).
The big question is - why oh why doesn't the dickhead australian voiceover bloke use Meters and Kilograms instead of feet and flamin' pounds?
On the UK version they do use metric measurements on the voiceover...
I will use Javascript to do everything, even things that can be done with plain HTML like opening a new window
:(
Opening a new window has been depricated in XHTML - the only way to do it is JavaShit. Which is good because I hate webmasters assuming I want links opened in a new window (I almost never do - if I did I would've clicked "open in new window"). Unfortunately it's bad coz they'll just use Javascript instead.
How hot do they get? As of now I am only using 5400RPM ATA Samsung drives and they are cool (30is degrees C) and quiet (neither spin nor access noise).
:)
The Baracuda's are 7200rpm drives - the machine is in my living room with "quiet" components (so there isn't a huge amount of air flow through the case anyway). smartctl says the drive temperature is 45 degrees C ATM:
Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 045 052 000 Old_age Always - 45
So not exactly cool, but given that limited airflow it's not bad. The drive isn't currently bolted in either - it's just sitting on the bottom of the case so I guess the contact area to dissipate heat to the case is less than if it was bolted into the drive bay.
This I can confirm. I lost two of them already. And they are really noisy.
We lost a reasonably large number at work and have since switched to Seagates too. I originally had an 80 gig Maxtor in my MythTV machine as well but it failed after 9 months, I sent it back to the retailer under warranty and got my cash back, which I promptly spent on the 120 gig Seagate drive costing what I origionally paid for the 80.
Why is this important to me? I can't stand those 7200RPM disks on the desktop. Too noisy.
:)
The 120 gig Seagate Baracuda in my MythTV machine is quiet as... a very quiet thing... on national quiet day.
The crappy 40 gig Maxtor in my server, however, is noisy as hell and I long for the day when it dies to give me an excuse to replace the damned thing.
(Shouldn't be long - maxtors don't seem to take long to fail spectacularly in my experience).
On top of the applications, I like to RAID just about everything and backup critical data to secondary machines once in a while. I do this because backup technologies (Tape/DVD etc) have not kept pace with hard drives in terms of cost and capacity and hard drives do fail from time to time.
RAID is a good "continuation-of-service" solution (i.e. you stand a good chance of being able to continue using the system during a failure), but IMHO it's absolutely no substitute for a backup. For one, the RAID applies changes immediately - so a slip with the rm command and you've lost your data immediately instead of being able to get it back from last night's backup. Secondly, if the PSU goes boom it could take out all the drives in the RAID (I've seen it happen).
Am I the only guy on the planet who doesn't seem to need more than about 80GB?
It very much depends on what you're using your computer for. i.e. my dad stores some wordprocessing files on his machine and that's about it. Same goes for my sister (hell, she still uses floppy disks!). On the other hand, my server has a 40 gig drive in it that's got about 2 gig free most of the time - it's got a chunk of space dedicated to MP3s, another fairly large chunk of space dedicated to my digital photos, more space for large sourcecode trees I'm working on. On the occasion that I glue large panoramic photos together, 10 - 15 gig of free space is handy (when you're dealling with a large number of massive TIFFs they take up huge amounts of disk space).
Meanwhile, my MythTV box has a 120 gig hard drive in it that's full most of the time (MythTV keeps my video archive trimmed to fit on the drive by expiring old shows). And my laptop has a tiny 20 gig drive that is reasonably full most of the time since it has the operating system and a backup of my photos on it.
I think you'll find anyone who does high-res photo or video editing will want as much (fast) drive space as they can get their hands on.
With that, harddisks are completely reliable *enough*. Maybe burn a DVD of pics every once in a while, the digicam ones are pretty big. But that's it.
For digital cameras for Joe Public I think the industry needs to develop a _really_ long term and cheap storage medium. I.e. the digital equivalent of 35mm negatives that can be left on the shelf for decades without any problems. I certainly wouldn't trust any of the current technology for that: Writable optical media (CD-R's, etc) has a habit of degrading over time, hard drives eventually die spectacularly (and are rather big for leaving on the shelf) and Flash is quite expensive and I'm not sure I'd trust leaving it untouched for decades. A write-once card the size of Compact Flash that's designed specifically for long-term storage would be nice. (Long term meaning over 100 years I think).
I keep all my photos on my server and they get regular backups to optical media, but "normal people" don't want to do that - they want a cheap memory card that they can burn a set of photos to and then leave in a cupboard.
Why should the telco have to setup everything as if you'd use voice and DSL (which I gather has to be done on most systems just to GET DSL) if you were not required to use the voice?
Seems anticompetetive to me - why would (most) people switch to a VoIP provider if they're forced to pay for the POTS line anyway?
Besides, I already pay a subscription to my ISP (who in turn pay the telco, BT, for the line, hardware, etc.). So in effect I'm being made to pay for the line twice - once through the ISP for the DSL service and then again as the monthly subscription for a voice line I never use.
I'd totally love to dump my craptacualar tel-co (in my case Verizon), but still keep my DSL line, and jump fully into VoIP.
I can only hope the UK don't follow suit - Currently I have a DSL line from BT which requires me to have a POTS line too. I understand that OfCom (the UK version of the FCC) was supposed to be forcing BT to supply naked DSL some time last year but I've heard nothing more about it... A real shame coz VoIP call charges are about the same as BT's but without the monthly subscription.
IMHO requiring you to have a POTS line together with your internet connection is anticompetetive - why would (most) people switch to a VoIP provider if they're having to pay for the POTS line anyway?
robots with only a couple of more generations before they explode
:)
Suicide bombing robots?!? EVERYONE RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
Perhaps Microsoft should include an option, like 'Prepare this computer for resale,' which utterly destroys all data."
:)
So what happens when you present the average windows user with a big red button that says "don't press this button"?...
I guess we won't have to put up with so many windows users on the internet anyway
I thought DSL (and dialup) already had that, and that was only an issue with cable modem.
Not from what I've seen - some ISPs filter spoofed traffic with a source address outside the ISP's network, others appear to do no filtering at all. I'm not sure if any bother to filter based on a customer's allocated network.
cuts their access (using iptables) to everything except an internal Webserver to notify them of their infection.
:)
An additional point - the internal web server should really provide the tools to clean the infection, otherwise someone's gonna be screwed when their access to the clean up tools has been blocked. Even smarter would be to identify the infection and redirect them to a page that contains the tools and instructions for cleaning that specific infection. (Hell, for people using IE the internal webserver could exploit one of the many security holes in it and automagically clean the machine.
90% of the DDoS problem would be dealt with if ISPs used competent edge filtering on their networks.
Even better would be filtering as close to the customer as possible - if your DSL connection has been allocated the network 1.2.3.4/29 then all traffic from your DSL *not* coming from 1.2.3.4/29 can be filtered at the ISP end of the DSL pipe - i.e. it's filtered before it even enters the ISP network. This prevents spoofing of other users on the same ISP - any unblocked traffic would easilly be traced back to the customer who sourced it since it would *have* to come from the customer's allocated subnet.
(This stuff shouldn't really be rocket science - ISPs do traffic shaping on a per-DSL basis so there's absolutely no reason why they can't also do source address filtering on a per-DSL basis).
PSP, P2P, PS2
:)
Not to mention anything relating to old IBM PS/2 machines
The means to properly operate a computer is as far beyond the reach of the average person as is the ability to tune their car and replace the fan belt. It's not that their stupid,it's that the concepts are completely alien to them.
So when their (windows) computer breaks they can take it down to PC World and pay to get it fixed. What's the big deal?
Maybe what's needed is recommended service intervals - i.e. the manual recommends you to take your computer to a "service centre" every 12 months and pay for it's annual spyware cleanup, security updates, whatever. This would be exactly the same as a car - if you're knowledgable enough you can service it yourself and you don't _have_ to get it serviced, but if you refuse to get it serviced and it goes tits up you really can't complain.
Infact this would be better than the arrangement that cars have since most modern cars need specialist equipment to service them whereas the tools you need to "service" your computer are (mostly) freely available for anyone with enough knowledge to use.
I'm sorry, but I just don't get how people can buy a computer with no knowledge about how to use it and then complain that they have to pay someone with the knowledge to fix it. I'm afraid this is the way the Real World works - if you need something doing and you don't have the knowledge to do it yourself then you pay someone else to do it.
Especially when all they have to do is offer them chocolate before they bust them;-)
That survey is almost certainly complete rubbish - if someone came up to me in the street and offered me chocolate in exchange for my password I'd just give them a bogus password so I could get my chocolate.
Those jokers admitted they were behind in 98-99
They're still behind now - none of the standard windows services support v6 yet and there appears to be no way (under XPSP2) of manually configuring the IP address.
Compared to my Linux boxes, which have all but a few stubborn services running on IPv6. (I currently have to use v4 for Asterisk, Portmap and CUPS... which is stunningly bad given that CUPS is a new system but doesn't do IPv6 at all.)