I have NEVER>/b> in my day seen a security breach that didn't rest on managements shoulders. Lax policies, no thought into process or control, apathy towards security, starve the security budget because you can't watch porn undetected, side with lazy cannot change types, but it all comes down to incompetence of management every time. Now you can't put that in a report to management, but it is the truth.
Reports to management need a fall guy, usually the person on the front line that does not have the authority, no tools nor process defined for the safe handling of data.
How you got mod points for that statement is beyond me, if I had them now I would have said troll.
And now they demand source code? Well I can assure you that it will *not* happen.
Unless you have a very honest and disciplined owner/executive board it will happen. But don't worry.
I was in a similar situation in the last 3+ years. Management was looking for excuse to get rid of people. Wanted source. Gave it to them, even walked them through compiling it. That was three years ago now when they outsourced it to India. I was since RIFed.
Today, 3 years later with 20 times the development staff it is 2 years behind schedule and 5 times over budget. It is a critical application for 1/3 of their fortune 500 business. Worse yet, it still doesn't work for the new changes needed. To add, they no longer have the modified sources.
Saved a dime and spent a buck. They are so screwed they don't know how bad. People are afraid to ask or tell. It is open sources biggest strength and I can't blame China for wanting to see compilable source without the NSAKey nonsense. Would you want someone in DC pushing buttons on a Chinese nuclear sub?
It is a sad day when ISPs toss out usenet. Usenet was and still is to a lesser degree what many of of got hooked on. A free, generally not moderated and everyone had access to it. Now, we digress into 1000's of web sites,/. included to exchange ideas. While/. is large enough with a wide audience and is good, most web based boards are horrid, operated by a ego driven owner and never even get my book marks.
My ISP, Shaw just outsourced usenet to someone who can't keep it running. I guess we too are gut off. And no, the google interface does not cut it.
Perhaps, then, the Star Trek vision of the future, where all life forms are similar, could be correct, at least to the extent that they're all DNA and carbon based? Also, wouldn't this push the chances of life evolving on a suitable planet close to 100%?
Did you know what you said is profoundly intelligent but less than 2% of the people on this planet have a concept of what you said?
There is life out there boys and girls. Why are we wasting time here with stupid conventional armies fighting a cultural war when we could be out there finding it? I would so much like to be alive and be a witness to first contact.
I'd rather someone sit and tell me how he/she has solved a significant business problem. Or what their biggest challenge has been in the last year. I can pick with 100% accuracy how good a programmer will be in 20 minutes without looking at a line of code.
Yep, we like to hire in our own image. So is that why most I/T and programming environments are loaded with managers and control freaks with so very few technical/programmer types? You know, those that can't do manage. Or that you already have a lot of "business" types that can plan and organize?
Say if you were to see a surgeon to get fixed up. Would you want the surgeon who knew the financial aspects of the "business" or the technical side of making you right? Tell me why it isn't different in the computer/software development business?
We operate as teams and berating a persons skills because they are not the "business" is getting tiresome, and usually a sign of confused and dysfunctional management. They none the less are a contributor to the business with their specialized skills are at least as valuable as yours. If you exude that then they will want to work for you.
The shuttle program is primarily a technology-jobs program. The science stuff they do in space (orbiting grade-school teachers, studying John Glenn's bones) is kind of trivial compared to the 10,000 high-tech jobs created in the USA, paid for by the billions of dollars NASA spends on shuttle contracts. How all that money would otherwise get spent, is what I wonder about.
Apparently your answer is easy. They would rather spend it overseas on a cultural war with conventional forces than to learn something about the universe we live in. When in fact, Iraq could have just been a 30 day exercise it is now a mainstay. BTW, I do agree the US should have gone over there, but my orders would have been much different. They would have been simple. "I don't care what weapons you use (small nukes included) but you have 30 days and I want Bin Ladden and Saddam Hussein either surrendered or dead." Because after 30 days, we pull out. You want to do this fast so the politics does not creep into it to make it un-winnable.
And think, the middle east rich mostly Islamic/Muslim "friendlies" must be laughing so hard. They have their two worst internal enemies taken care of at American expense and get $100+ per barrel of oil. Toss in the US military as the local regional police force. Top it off with desert for having the US non-believers economy a mess.
Please, explain how "private" banking statements differ. My business banking account statements are laid out differently from my personal accounts (the former show credits, checks paid, and then debits; the latter is a chronological listing of all activity, line-by-line) but there's nothing extremely complex about it. Even my brokerage account statement is laid out in a categorical format (purchases, sales, current holdings, margin activity, etc.). What other way is there to lay out a bank statement other than by date or by item type?
If he has 1000 line items in a month, probably has at least 1000 or possibly 3000 stocks. Say 3-4 per month split or get bought out, do you track every single one for the $10 remainder? Do you pull out a calculator to check every odd lot's dividend? Do you look up the banks average daily interest rate and check that the interest was correct? Do you check every stock that should pay you has in fact paid you your dividend? Also double check the reversals to make sure they are right. Oh yes, they too make mistakes and it shows. Credit for $11.01 when in fact it should have been $101.11. That makes 3 lines often on 2 or 3 different statements.
Now the biggest one, do you trust that 1000 additions and subtractions is correct every month? How do you know the computer did the math correctly? $127 + 126 isn't 243!
I am no where near 1000 lines, but getting there with 6 accounts and 5-20 stocks per it is a weekend killer to audit. But I have caught issues! The most recent, I am supposed to be "fee free" because I maintain a income account over x dollars. Well, they started charging an account a $4.95 monthly fee they were not supposed to. I might have another issue too, a trading fee if a deal goes through...but undoubtedly you have to keep onto them.
And some of the Scandinavian countries are courting datacenters. They have plenty of power from geothermal energy and also have the colder outside air to make cooling more efficient and/or basically free.
Canada isn't that far, take Revelstoke and the Mica dam. I would even apply to work there. Put the heat exchangers into the lake, could cool down a data center nicely. Internet access, trivial, the fibre runs right by the town to Calgary and Vancouver.
I was just about to think no-one would bring up SOX, when AC came to the rescue. The SOX requirements AFAIK for IT are insane. People doing development aren't allowed to touch production systems, for example.
I think that Sarbanes and Oxley must have hated IT technical staff. SOX has turned out to be a nightmare for us. And worse yet, SOX isn't effective. The auditors miss lots that would ordinary be caught in a non-SOX environment. SOX hinders the operational staff so much, details go amiss.
I am watching my current environment, looks like the CIO is pushing finance and CIO that if we want SOX, we have to fund SOX and operate it as a dedicated group towards that end. What a novel concept. As most IT shops didn't get head count with SOX.
Her IT department is layered, not flat. The fact that simple changes take 6 months shows that it's not 5000 doing anything useful, it's probably more like 2000 doing something useful, who have to ask the 1000 above them, who need signatures from the 500 above them, who need approval from the 200 above them, etc. They sheer number of them is hurting their performance, not helping.
I would be surprised if the ratio was that good. I just left an environment earlier this year, and engineered my exit. Stole a page from management, why quit when you can get a severance?
17000 users, 15 IT managers, 60 "business analysts" (*of which none could ever code, configure or design) and 25 overworked technical types. Management got into the WeSaySo against rationality so the techs were quitting. Me, I made a snarky remark to a manager and got severanced. He didn't know it was planned until my exit as I saw the patterns of firings.
In my view, the ratio of _effective_ IT to the business was 25:17000. Was not a nice place to work and major projects were often 2 years behind and flopping like dying fish with the techs taking the blame. It is now one of the questions I research.
You are behind the times. ATI cards, as far as price vs performance, are spanking NVidia's cards with moon rocks. I think a big helping hand in that is that for whatever reason, AMD said to them, "make better drivers, or else!".
Also, AMD has gone the route of trying to be more open source friendly with their cards, more so than NVidia.
Currently, you just can't go wrong with owning a current generation Radeon card right now.
Nice sell. And yes, I did suspect my original post was going to get mod -1.
But the fact remains, has ATI released code or how to for say a ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0? Last I checked the answer was no. There were plenty who bought this to find bad drivers, would not even work with MCE! But just checked, finally some better support...unfortunately a year late for me as I junked it.
Maybe AMD changed ATI? As just before ATI was bought they did a pretty crappy job in supporting Linux and the *BSDs. I still remember the rant at the time where open source developers wouldn't even get a email answer from them. How we forget this.
I know AMD the underdog now owns ATI, but it didn't do anything for their share prices either. But ATI is not on my buy list until I see the portability, price and performance for myself.
Nehalem is really the realization of what many slashdotters have claimed before - the typical user doesn't need that much more performance. Both datacenters and laptop users ask for the same thing - power efficiency - and Intel delivers. The Atom is another part of the strategy, even though it's current coupled with a very inefficient chipset.
True. The users have jet engines on Volkswagen chassis right now. For Vista? Wowa, that is nuts. I want more performance in the new processors without the OS baggage thank you.
The thing is, today we have the knowledge and complexity to fire up kilowatt systems and more - but they're costly running. Certainly there's the extreme hardcore gamers who won't mind running the hottest, most powerhungry quad crossfire system, but they're few and far between. Laptop users think battery life. Desktop users think electricity costs. The result is Nehalem, which promises to deliver a lot more performance per watt.
If you are a laptop user, a X2 (AMD) is by the far the best. Video chipset aside, get NVidia, as ATI sucks. Mind you, I haven't bought ATI for awhile, with their anti-open source and poor driver support for products like ATI Video Blunder.
If the practise is as good as the theory, AMD is unfortunately in deep shit. They've always been good at delivering ok processors at an ok price, but power efficiency has really only been their strength compared to the Netburst (PIV) processors, not P3 or the Cores. If it amounts to "yeah your processors are cheaper but they cost more to operate" things will fall apart, which is sad since ATI is really doing fine. The 48xx series are kick-ass cards, I just hope they can keep up the competition against Intel...
Actually, I think AMD produces good processors and blundered with acquiring ATI. ATI while real good last century, they lost it. They became anti-Linux, support in OSes like BSD and Solaris dwindled and they wouldn't even say no to emails. ATI Vido Blunder just topped the cake.
I will not buy ATI until it say on the package Solaris, Linux and Windblows supported.
BTW, you should get Firefox, it tells you where your spelling mistakes are and is a safer more portable browser. 3.0 is really a hoot.
Instead of paying already rich celebrities to pimp out Vista, how about invest that $300 million into developing a SP2 that fixes the damn thing already.
Because at this point, you have to do it with some dry humor. Many of us have given up fixing Vista and have moved on.
99% of IPv4 traffic is bittorrent. Switch it to IPV6 and the traffic figures will spike!
Why not NAT you home users, say packing 64536 users through one NAT IP, 64536:1 reduction in wasted IP space. Don't log it so the RIAA can sue for what does not exist. I know of at least one bit torrent user that would love that anonymity.
If people could actually get IPv6 service from their providers instead of having to route everything through congested tunnels, THAT would help.
Myth: We need IPV6
Fact: PITA to use IPV6 so we use IPV4
There isn't really a shortage of IP addresses at all. There is an extreme waste of IP space.
Case in point, take China squandering class A after class A (x/8). Why not just NAT the typical home users? Could do the same in Chicago, NY, California and London too. I know businesses that still have/16 spaces when in fact a/24 would do. And any business today using network routable addresses internally, well, their incompetence shines through. 10/8, 192.168/16 and others, plenty of space.
Take the waste of home IPs on my DSL, if you use one, you may be really using 4.
cable modem/lower default
your static IP
your static IP
upper local broadcast
Or at least that is how my DSL used to work and my cable does today (yes, I have 2 static). There are some variations to this, but we waste most of the address space. In this case, 1/2 wasted and that is efficient.
And like domain squatting, many companies IP squat hogging not just IPV4 space, but have hogged IPV6 space too.
We haven't gotten to the logistics of the changeover and costs of IPV6, let alone the technical issues. At this point, IPV6 is pie in the sky for most. Oh, a few tunnel it over IPV4, or the ones with enough to rent fiber by the strand for bragging rights. But it is a macho thing.
In the end, many years out IPV6 is needed. But it isn't that impending as Cisco and others who would profit by it would have you or I believe. That is why it's adoption is small until the costs and technical issues are completely addressed.
Much older, the PC Party joined the Reform party, so in fact PC Party now lives on in the Conservative party. Why Reformers ever did this was beyond me.
They did this to look acceptable. The Reform Party is a bunch of unwashed evangelist rednecks, which never amounted to any significance in Canadian politics. The Progressive Conservative Party, on the other hand, has had a pretty long list of distinguished leaders, and even though it mostly was the opposition, has had plenty of positive influence in Canadian politics (it was the party that founded Canada, for that matter, and the party that had built the transcontinental railroad).
The reform party as itself could never gain power, as it is dramatically opposed to all canadian values, so it simply swallowed-up the conservatives just to get the respectable name, thus giving themselves only a veneer of respectability.
Reformers were the official opposition when the PC party almost slipped into non-existence. If you mean distinguished? Do you mean like Brian Mulroney, the one that accepts $300,000 cash? Or do you mean Stephan Harper, the one that we don't trust because he lies costing Canadian investors almost as much as US investors were hit with Enron?
But I suspect you are a civil servant, they hated Reformers because they never hid their agenda of cleaning up bribe and corruption central, Ottawa.
If Canadian politicians don't respond to the wishes of their constituents, they have the option of replacing them. The current ruling party, for example, is only about 20 years old.
It's not comparable to the US system where Democrats have a monopoly on the left and Republicans on the right.
Much older, the PC Party joined the Reform party, so in fact PC Party now lives on in the Conservative party. Why Reformers ever did this was beyond me.
Canadian politics is like the Three Stooges. Moe (Harper), Curly (Laytoon) and Larry (Dion). People don't have real confidence in any of them.
These tories have been warned, enact this legislation and they will be destroyed politically. Harper won't be able to run for village mayor after we're through with him.
But it does show in majority governments in Canada, they are term dictators. The senate is nothing more than old patronage buddies collecting big bucks to rubber stamp things. But fortunately we are in a minority government situation which makes the dictatorship more tenuous.
1 line of logging per 200 lines of code is way too much. 2 in 5 lines is absolutely insane. I've seen way too many systems where the logging made it totally unusable. People just don't realize the costs of logging everything.
There's absolutely no way to document anything this verbose. Without documentation, the logging is useless.
Huh?
Depends entirely on logic, not generalized statements. If you're into a potentially problematic section of code, 5-10 log statements per 100 lines may not be enough. If you are in a section of code that is verbose code but not much to go wrong, the logging statements should be far fewer. Good logs is essential to debugging and problem determination and more is generally better than not enough so generalization is not going to fit here.
And in the code, just because there is a log statement does not mean it generates logs, add filters to the approriate level,
We have all seen it. Ebay a couple of years ago going down due to Oracle corruption. Royal Bank of Canada failure due to an improper software upgrade. Now, Google with Gmail and other Google Apps failing. All of these organizations were geared towards having the highest uptimes available and failed spectacularly.
Two of the most commonly missed points about high availability are simplicity and use the basic tools first. HA solutions are often complex, error prone and ignore the basics such as good system management practices. And when the complexity goes wrong, it is a mess.
For example, many systems in need of HA share storage on a SAN that is changing daily for other systems in the big SAN cloud. If it was important, why not directly attach the disk? Must everything be on a SAN to keep the egos happy? No cables to get pinched, moved, switch configuration issues etc. Mirror the disk, RAID 0+1 and don't get fancy and cheap with RAID 5/50 etc. Oh, and make sure you mirror across controllers, and do the nasty IT thing, test it.
And manage access control, the fewer people into a system, and the more qualified helps a lot. Once I saw a HA project that failed miserably, a well meaning DBA needed more space so they "mkdir/v14" and thought that was all to making more file space, until it filled up / on both the main system and the fail over at the same time. LOL. Process has more to with high uptime than does complex clustering. Critically review all the changes for technical (not political) sanity goes a long way.
But to Google, they are actually doing a good job. Anyone remember the MSN issues? Took many many months to get stability back if I recall correctly.
But why authenticate to fragile poorly managed MS-ADCs?
Why not setup a robust LDAP network on native Linux/UNIX and call it a day. Have 6 continuous years of service up-time on my service. Average per node is a few minutes per year, 9/10 fully planned. Maintenance, I do this part time. Highly automated and linked to HR including bi-directional password sync.
In fact, it feeds AD. Created in LDAP first, an admin enables AD including email if needed. All data is 100 in sync.
They just raised it... Two weeks ago when I ordered 6 new computers for two different clients it was only a $50 upgrade to get it with XP pre-installed.
Oh well, you can always exercise your downgrade rights under the EULA and use a privious Dell OEM XP Cd if you have one laying around from previous systems, and still be legal without paying the Down/Upgrade tax.
I call this the double dip.
Win 7 for these computers will be the triple dip.
Me, only been Vista dipped once, XP system got a repreive from running Linus when the new Vista quad core runs Linux, go figure.
Me, I am of the Microsoft tread mill. Retire in 2-3 more years, will buy a Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck Labour.
I have NEVER>/b> in my day seen a security breach that didn't rest on managements shoulders. Lax policies, no thought into process or control, apathy towards security, starve the security budget because you can't watch porn undetected, side with lazy cannot change types, but it all comes down to incompetence of management every time. Now you can't put that in a report to management, but it is the truth.
Reports to management need a fall guy, usually the person on the front line that does not have the authority, no tools nor process defined for the safe handling of data.
How you got mod points for that statement is beyond me, if I had them now I would have said troll.
And now they demand source code? Well I can assure you that it will *not* happen.
Unless you have a very honest and disciplined owner/executive board it will happen. But don't worry.
I was in a similar situation in the last 3+ years. Management was looking for excuse to get rid of people. Wanted source. Gave it to them, even walked them through compiling it. That was three years ago now when they outsourced it to India. I was since RIFed.
Today, 3 years later with 20 times the development staff it is 2 years behind schedule and 5 times over budget. It is a critical application for 1/3 of their fortune 500 business. Worse yet, it still doesn't work for the new changes needed. To add, they no longer have the modified sources.
Saved a dime and spent a buck. They are so screwed they don't know how bad. People are afraid to ask or tell. It is open sources biggest strength and I can't blame China for wanting to see compilable source without the NSAKey nonsense. Would you want someone in DC pushing buttons on a Chinese nuclear sub?
It is a sad day when ISPs toss out usenet. Usenet was and still is to a lesser degree what many of of got hooked on. A free, generally not moderated and everyone had access to it. Now, we digress into 1000's of web sites, /. included to exchange ideas. While /. is large enough with a wide audience and is good, most web based boards are horrid, operated by a ego driven owner and never even get my book marks.
My ISP, Shaw just outsourced usenet to someone who can't keep it running. I guess we too are gut off. And no, the google interface does not cut it.
Perhaps, then, the Star Trek vision of the future, where all life forms are similar, could be correct, at least to the extent that they're all DNA and carbon based? Also, wouldn't this push the chances of life evolving on a suitable planet close to 100%?
Did you know what you said is profoundly intelligent but less than 2% of the people on this planet have a concept of what you said?
There is life out there boys and girls. Why are we wasting time here with stupid conventional armies fighting a cultural war when we could be out there finding it? I would so much like to be alive and be a witness to first contact.
How does turning it into an XP box help? XP is just essentially a vending machine.
You are of course right. But the reason I am sure is purely political. At least it will not be Vista, this we know for sure.
I'd rather someone sit and tell me how he/she has solved a significant business problem. Or what their biggest challenge has been in the last year. I can pick with 100% accuracy how good a programmer will be in 20 minutes without looking at a line of code.
Yep, we like to hire in our own image. So is that why most I/T and programming environments are loaded with managers and control freaks with so very few technical/programmer types? You know, those that can't do manage. Or that you already have a lot of "business" types that can plan and organize?
Say if you were to see a surgeon to get fixed up. Would you want the surgeon who knew the financial aspects of the "business" or the technical side of making you right? Tell me why it isn't different in the computer/software development business?
We operate as teams and berating a persons skills because they are not the "business" is getting tiresome, and usually a sign of confused and dysfunctional management. They none the less are a contributor to the business with their specialized skills are at least as valuable as yours. If you exude that then they will want to work for you.
The shuttle program is primarily a technology-jobs program. The science stuff they do in space (orbiting grade-school teachers, studying John Glenn's bones) is kind of trivial compared to the 10,000 high-tech jobs created in the USA, paid for by the billions of dollars NASA spends on shuttle contracts. How all that money would otherwise get spent, is what I wonder about.
Apparently your answer is easy. They would rather spend it overseas on a cultural war with conventional forces than to learn something about the universe we live in. When in fact, Iraq could have just been a 30 day exercise it is now a mainstay. BTW, I do agree the US should have gone over there, but my orders would have been much different. They would have been simple. "I don't care what weapons you use (small nukes included) but you have 30 days and I want Bin Ladden and Saddam Hussein either surrendered or dead." Because after 30 days, we pull out. You want to do this fast so the politics does not creep into it to make it un-winnable.
And think, the middle east rich mostly Islamic/Muslim "friendlies" must be laughing so hard. They have their two worst internal enemies taken care of at American expense and get $100+ per barrel of oil. Toss in the US military as the local regional police force. Top it off with desert for having the US non-believers economy a mess.
Please, explain how "private" banking statements differ. My business banking account statements are laid out differently from my personal accounts (the former show credits, checks paid, and then debits; the latter is a chronological listing of all activity, line-by-line) but there's nothing extremely complex about it. Even my brokerage account statement is laid out in a categorical format (purchases, sales, current holdings, margin activity, etc.). What other way is there to lay out a bank statement other than by date or by item type?
If he has 1000 line items in a month, probably has at least 1000 or possibly 3000 stocks. Say 3-4 per month split or get bought out, do you track every single one for the $10 remainder? Do you pull out a calculator to check every odd lot's dividend? Do you look up the banks average daily interest rate and check that the interest was correct? Do you check every stock that should pay you has in fact paid you your dividend? Also double check the reversals to make sure they are right. Oh yes, they too make mistakes and it shows. Credit for $11.01 when in fact it should have been $101.11. That makes 3 lines often on 2 or 3 different statements.
Now the biggest one, do you trust that 1000 additions and subtractions is correct every month? How do you know the computer did the math correctly? $127 + 126 isn't 243!
I am no where near 1000 lines, but getting there with 6 accounts and 5-20 stocks per it is a weekend killer to audit. But I have caught issues! The most recent, I am supposed to be "fee free" because I maintain a income account over x dollars. Well, they started charging an account a $4.95 monthly fee they were not supposed to. I might have another issue too, a trading fee if a deal goes through...but undoubtedly you have to keep onto them.
That is unquestionably the best post I have read in weeks.
And some of the Scandinavian countries are courting datacenters. They have plenty of power from geothermal energy and also have the colder outside air to make cooling more efficient and/or basically free.
Canada isn't that far, take Revelstoke and the Mica dam. I would even apply to work there. Put the heat exchangers into the lake, could cool down a data center nicely. Internet access, trivial, the fibre runs right by the town to Calgary and Vancouver.
I was just about to think no-one would bring up SOX, when AC came to the rescue. The SOX requirements AFAIK for IT are insane. People doing development aren't allowed to touch production systems, for example.
I think that Sarbanes and Oxley must have hated IT technical staff. SOX has turned out to be a nightmare for us. And worse yet, SOX isn't effective. The auditors miss lots that would ordinary be caught in a non-SOX environment. SOX hinders the operational staff so much, details go amiss.
I am watching my current environment, looks like the CIO is pushing finance and CIO that if we want SOX, we have to fund SOX and operate it as a dedicated group towards that end. What a novel concept. As most IT shops didn't get head count with SOX.
Her IT department is layered, not flat. The fact that simple changes take 6 months shows that it's not 5000 doing anything useful, it's probably more like 2000 doing something useful, who have to ask the 1000 above them, who need signatures from the 500 above them, who need approval from the 200 above them, etc. They sheer number of them is hurting their performance, not helping.
I would be surprised if the ratio was that good. I just left an environment earlier this year, and engineered my exit. Stole a page from management, why quit when you can get a severance?
17000 users, 15 IT managers, 60 "business analysts" (*of which none could ever code, configure or design) and 25 overworked technical types. Management got into the WeSaySo against rationality so the techs were quitting. Me, I made a snarky remark to a manager and got severanced. He didn't know it was planned until my exit as I saw the patterns of firings.
In my view, the ratio of _effective_ IT to the business was 25:17000. Was not a nice place to work and major projects were often 2 years behind and flopping like dying fish with the techs taking the blame. It is now one of the questions I research.
You are behind the times. ATI cards, as far as price vs performance, are spanking NVidia's cards with moon rocks. I think a big helping hand in that is that for whatever reason, AMD said to them, "make better drivers, or else!".
Also, AMD has gone the route of trying to be more open source friendly with their cards, more so than NVidia.
Currently, you just can't go wrong with owning a current generation Radeon card right now.
Nice sell. And yes, I did suspect my original post was going to get mod -1.
But the fact remains, has ATI released code or how to for say a ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0? Last I checked the answer was no. There were plenty who bought this to find bad drivers, would not even work with MCE! But just checked, finally some better support...unfortunately a year late for me as I junked it.
Maybe AMD changed ATI? As just before ATI was bought they did a pretty crappy job in supporting Linux and the *BSDs. I still remember the rant at the time where open source developers wouldn't even get a email answer from them. How we forget this.
I know AMD the underdog now owns ATI, but it didn't do anything for their share prices either. But ATI is not on my buy list until I see the portability, price and performance for myself.
Nehalem is really the realization of what many slashdotters have claimed before - the typical user doesn't need that much more performance. Both datacenters and laptop users ask for the same thing - power efficiency - and Intel delivers. The Atom is another part of the strategy, even though it's current coupled with a very inefficient chipset.
True. The users have jet engines on Volkswagen chassis right now. For Vista? Wowa, that is nuts. I want more performance in the new processors without the OS baggage thank you.
The thing is, today we have the knowledge and complexity to fire up kilowatt systems and more - but they're costly running. Certainly there's the extreme hardcore gamers who won't mind running the hottest, most powerhungry quad crossfire system, but they're few and far between. Laptop users think battery life. Desktop users think electricity costs. The result is Nehalem, which promises to deliver a lot more performance per watt.
If you are a laptop user, a X2 (AMD) is by the far the best. Video chipset aside, get NVidia, as ATI sucks. Mind you, I haven't bought ATI for awhile, with their anti-open source and poor driver support for products like ATI Video Blunder.
If the practise is as good as the theory, AMD is unfortunately in deep shit. They've always been good at delivering ok processors at an ok price, but power efficiency has really only been their strength compared to the Netburst (PIV) processors, not P3 or the Cores. If it amounts to "yeah your processors are cheaper but they cost more to operate" things will fall apart, which is sad since ATI is really doing fine. The 48xx series are kick-ass cards, I just hope they can keep up the competition against Intel...
Actually, I think AMD produces good processors and blundered with acquiring ATI. ATI while real good last century, they lost it. They became anti-Linux, support in OSes like BSD and Solaris dwindled and they wouldn't even say no to emails. ATI Vido Blunder just topped the cake.
I will not buy ATI until it say on the package Solaris, Linux and Windblows supported.
BTW, you should get Firefox, it tells you where your spelling mistakes are and is a safer more portable browser. 3.0 is really a hoot.
Instead of paying already rich celebrities to pimp out Vista, how about invest that $300 million into developing a SP2 that fixes the damn thing already.
Because at this point, you have to do it with some dry humor. Many of us have given up fixing Vista and have moved on.
99% of IPv4 traffic is bittorrent. Switch it to IPV6 and the traffic figures will spike!
Why not NAT you home users, say packing 64536 users through one NAT IP, 64536:1 reduction in wasted IP space. Don't log it so the RIAA can sue for what does not exist. I know of at least one bit torrent user that would love that anonymity.
If people could actually get IPv6 service from their providers instead of having to route everything through congested tunnels, THAT would help.
Myth: We need IPV6
Fact: PITA to use IPV6 so we use IPV4
There isn't really a shortage of IP addresses at all. There is an extreme waste of IP space.
Case in point, take China squandering class A after class A (x/8). Why not just NAT the typical home users? Could do the same in Chicago, NY, California and London too. I know businesses that still have /16 spaces when in fact a /24 would do. And any business today using network routable addresses internally, well, their incompetence shines through. 10/8, 192.168/16 and others, plenty of space.
Take the waste of home IPs on my DSL, if you use one, you may be really using 4.
Or at least that is how my DSL used to work and my cable does today (yes, I have 2 static). There are some variations to this, but we waste most of the address space. In this case, 1/2 wasted and that is efficient.
And like domain squatting, many companies IP squat hogging not just IPV4 space, but have hogged IPV6 space too.
We haven't gotten to the logistics of the changeover and costs of IPV6, let alone the technical issues. At this point, IPV6 is pie in the sky for most. Oh, a few tunnel it over IPV4, or the ones with enough to rent fiber by the strand for bragging rights. But it is a macho thing.
In the end, many years out IPV6 is needed. But it isn't that impending as Cisco and others who would profit by it would have you or I believe. That is why it's adoption is small until the costs and technical issues are completely addressed.
They did this to look acceptable. The Reform Party is a bunch of unwashed evangelist rednecks, which never amounted to any significance in Canadian politics. The Progressive Conservative Party, on the other hand, has had a pretty long list of distinguished leaders, and even though it mostly was the opposition, has had plenty of positive influence in Canadian politics (it was the party that founded Canada, for that matter, and the party that had built the transcontinental railroad).
The reform party as itself could never gain power, as it is dramatically opposed to all canadian values, so it simply swallowed-up the conservatives just to get the respectable name, thus giving themselves only a veneer of respectability.
Reformers were the official opposition when the PC party almost slipped into non-existence. If you mean distinguished? Do you mean like Brian Mulroney, the one that accepts $300,000 cash? Or do you mean Stephan Harper, the one that we don't trust because he lies costing Canadian investors almost as much as US investors were hit with Enron?
But I suspect you are a civil servant, they hated Reformers because they never hid their agenda of cleaning up bribe and corruption central, Ottawa.
If Canadian politicians don't respond to the wishes of their constituents, they have the option of replacing them. The current ruling party, for example, is only about 20 years old.
It's not comparable to the US system where Democrats have a monopoly on the left and Republicans on the right.
Much older, the PC Party joined the Reform party, so in fact PC Party now lives on in the Conservative party. Why Reformers ever did this was beyond me.
Canadian politics is like the Three Stooges. Moe (Harper), Curly (Laytoon) and Larry (Dion). People don't have real confidence in any of them.
These tories have been warned, enact this legislation and they will be destroyed politically. Harper won't be able to run for village mayor after we're through with him.
But it does show in majority governments in Canada, they are term dictators. The senate is nothing more than old patronage buddies collecting big bucks to rubber stamp things. But fortunately we are in a minority government situation which makes the dictatorship more tenuous.
1 line of logging per 200 lines of code is way too much. 2 in 5 lines is absolutely insane. I've seen way too many systems where the logging made it totally unusable. People just don't realize the costs of logging everything.
There's absolutely no way to document anything this verbose. Without documentation, the logging is useless.
Huh?
Depends entirely on logic, not generalized statements. If you're into a potentially problematic section of code, 5-10 log statements per 100 lines may not be enough. If you are in a section of code that is verbose code but not much to go wrong, the logging statements should be far fewer. Good logs is essential to debugging and problem determination and more is generally better than not enough so generalization is not going to fit here.
And in the code, just because there is a log statement does not mean it generates logs, add filters to the approriate level,
isn't that hard to implement is it?
We have all seen it. Ebay a couple of years ago going down due to Oracle corruption. Royal Bank of Canada failure due to an improper software upgrade. Now, Google with Gmail and other Google Apps failing. All of these organizations were geared towards having the highest uptimes available and failed spectacularly.
Two of the most commonly missed points about high availability are simplicity and use the basic tools first. HA solutions are often complex, error prone and ignore the basics such as good system management practices. And when the complexity goes wrong, it is a mess.
For example, many systems in need of HA share storage on a SAN that is changing daily for other systems in the big SAN cloud. If it was important, why not directly attach the disk? Must everything be on a SAN to keep the egos happy? No cables to get pinched, moved, switch configuration issues etc. Mirror the disk, RAID 0+1 and don't get fancy and cheap with RAID 5/50 etc. Oh, and make sure you mirror across controllers, and do the nasty IT thing, test it.
And manage access control, the fewer people into a system, and the more qualified helps a lot. Once I saw a HA project that failed miserably, a well meaning DBA needed more space so they "mkdir /v14" and thought that was all to making more file space, until it filled up / on both the main system and the fail over at the same time. LOL. Process has more to with high uptime than does complex clustering. Critically review all the changes for technical (not political) sanity goes a long way.
But to Google, they are actually doing a good job. Anyone remember the MSN issues? Took many many months to get stability back if I recall correctly.
But why authenticate to fragile poorly managed MS-ADCs?
Why not setup a robust LDAP network on native Linux/UNIX and call it a day. Have 6 continuous years of service up-time on my service. Average per node is a few minutes per year, 9/10 fully planned. Maintenance, I do this part time. Highly automated and linked to HR including bi-directional password sync.
In fact, it feeds AD. Created in LDAP first, an admin enables AD including email if needed. All data is 100 in sync.
Aim small, get small. 18000 or so users in all.
They tried AD once....LOL.
They just raised it... Two weeks ago when I ordered 6 new computers for two different clients it was only a $50 upgrade to get it with XP pre-installed.
Oh well, you can always exercise your downgrade rights under the EULA and use a privious Dell OEM XP Cd if you have one laying around from previous systems, and still be legal without paying the Down/Upgrade tax.
I call this the double dip.
Win 7 for these computers will be the triple dip.
Me, only been Vista dipped once, XP system got a repreive from running Linus when the new Vista quad core runs Linux, go figure.
Me, I am of the Microsoft tread mill. Retire in 2-3 more years, will buy a Mac.
Vista just sucks.
And keeps on sucking, and sucking...