Apple fails at hardware revision names, though. My Air is simply called a Macbook Air, even though it's the fourth generation. The new iPad is simply called "iPad". And yet the iPhone has a name, so this lack of hardware naming is inconsistent. Of course, I expect them to remedy this--but in the wrong direction.
I think Apple is still scarred from the mess they created in the mid 1990's. Who can forget their crystal clear lineup of systems
Macintosh Classic
Macintosh LC
Macintosh II
Macintosh Quadra
Macintosh Performa
Macintosh Centris
Macintosh PowerBook
each of which had a variety of model numbers and frequently comparable configurations. It left the company so scared (and scarred) that you practically have to look up the serial number to tell how old a given box is.
This reminds me of a time we were in the field and our beer got unappetizingly warm. Due to the kind of work we were doing, we had plenty of liquid nitrogen but insufficient refrigerator space for our liquid refreshments. One evening a member of the team decided he wanted a very cold Guinness and so poured about 250 ml of liquid nitrogen into his glass of beer.
Of course the nitrogen changed state but the surprise (to us anyway) was that the gas caused the beer to freeze sightly slower that it foamed. Within a few seconds, there was a meter or so of frozen beer foam standing up out of the glass. It was completely undrinkable (being in solid form), but wasn't bad if eaten with a spoon; which had to happen quickly as it started to melt immediately.
Moral: Don't send a bunch of twenty-something researchers into the desert for weeks on end without proper cooling equipment.
Not so much. Those were created while this whole Internet thing was a DoD/DoE/NSF (and other TLA) plaything. Anyone expecting that there would be a neutral, internationally managed jurisdiction was being idealistic and/or naive.
The problem is that governments have an established interest in and right to set the ground rules within their respective jurisdictions. For most of the internet, that comes down to boxes in their physical territory and the relevant CcTLD. The US has a first-mover advantage (or headache) in that they also created the.ORG,.NET,.COM,.MIL, and.EDU zones and can make a reasonable jurisdictional claim to them.
This is also why I think the open registration for TLDs is a bad idea. These jurisdictional issues are complicated enough (and will likely require a treaty or two to work out) without corporations in one country registering a TLD from a registrar in another to use for business worldwide. It's similar to the problem that had to be worked out internationally as corporate legal fictions became the norm in international commerce.
I beg to differ. Amazon does not have a monopoly on *anything* other than the manufacture of Kindles. However, this is just one of many types of eReaders (the actual market in question). Their goal is to maximize profit but they have to work within the ecosystem of publishers, competing retailers, and devices.
Before you snort and storm off, think about this. Fifteen years ago, Amazon was a nothing upstart going against some of the biggest and laziest incumbent retailers (I'm talking about the handful of music and book chains that dominated distribution in the US). They won that round by offering buyers what they wanted at prices that were better. As a company, they are more aware than most about how vulnerable a large incumbent can be to changes in its ecosystem. They are trying to find a product that will keep them relevant a decade from now.
What Amazon is doing is insisting on a piece of the action as the reseller (which every reseller does) and something extra for the distribution of bits. As I said before, that distribution fee may not be reasonable by any particular person's definition and is a reasonable subject for debate. <aside> Anything more than 15% above their wholesale rates (an overhead charge) seems excessive to *me* </aside> However, the only opinion that matters here is that of the publisher considering using Amazon as an e-document distributor. If Amazon's cost structure allows that organization to meet its revenue goals while keeping prices down to something consumers will accept, then it is good enough. If not, then the publisher will do something else (go elsewhere, beat on Amazon to reduce their cut, etc.). My point is that the publisher is the only one with the historical data to decide if the money is right. Some will and some won't.
This is also not to say the users are not getting screwed. That is a different question and involves what is a reasonable price to pay for an electronic, possibly DRM infected version of content you can also buy in dead-tree format. I tend to think that $9 is unreasonable for a paperback (and unconscionable for an electronic version) of entertainment prose. The question here to consider is "Who is screwing the customer?" I tend to think there is enough greed in enough places (publishers, advertising agencies, agents, resellers, authors, etc.) to spread the blame widely and thinly.
1.) Amazon is handling the distribution. If their formula is unreasonable, that is something to kick around but they do need to cover those costs.
2.) The publishers probably cannot "pop it in the mail" for less. The article's author is forgetting about or intentionally ignoring the printing costs.
At the end of the day, the question has to be "Is the publisher getting a better or worse return?" This article (and most others on this subject) neglect that issue entirely. It's easy to bash at Apple's or Amazon's costing formula. It's much harder (and would display a lot of the publishers' proprietary data) to discuss the real fiscal impact on the publishing industry.
So, this time the plan is to design a capsule-switched network with 2m capsules that, undoubtedly, will have a maximum weight. How long until someone realizes that efficiency would be improved if each packet, I mean capsule, could carry six times the cargo....
One of the more amusing blog entries from Sun engineers was a discussion of the amount of energy needed to completely fill a ZFS file system. A 128-bit address space isn't just optimistically big, it's "freaking huge!" http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_you
My daughter is almost three years-old. One of the most interesting things to observe is how she classifies her world. When she was 18 months old she would have classified a robot as sentient; she thought almost everything was alive (sort of a toddler version of pantheism). If it was a friendly robot, that would have put it in the realm of the three dogs and cat which she was already familiar with.
I tend to agree. Challenging this as a 1st Amendment issue is probably the weakest legal argument. It seems that the ex post facto violation would be stronger. Even more powerful would be to challenge this under the 5th amendment (unlawful taking) since property (in the form of legal, derivative works based on the public domain materials) is being rendered valueless.
Let's assume for a minute that the complaint is correct and that the school was remotely monitoring some set of students. (This might not be correct. Did the snapshot come from some public source like FaceBook?).
If it were my daughter's computer, I would not be talking about a class-action suit with a civil attorney. I would be sitting down at police HQ and the district attorney's office pursuing criminal charges against the individuals involved. They would need to face the felony charges that their behavior warranted. Once that was rolling, I would go after the individuals (not the district) for civil damages.
Why give a pass to the deep pockets? Simply because I don't want to have to look my neighbors in the face when a fractional point increase in their property taxes is required to pay a civil settlement that made me wealthy. I have no problems bankrupting the people who authorized and deployed the tech.
SPARC is still quite relevant; there are few things as nice as running a multi-threaded set of applications on the Sun Niagara chips. If I were a database software outfit I would want to make sure there were two architectures out there (IBM POWER and something else) focusing on enterprise performance rather than media creation/encoding.
Take a look. Is there anything in the Intel or AMD product pipeline that will get you 2 x 10 Gb ethernet, 64 thread pipelines, and 128 GB of RAM in a 1U box? Even better, the price is really competative with buying the same performance worth of x86 gear in multiple boxes by the time you think about rack space, cooling networking and all the rest of the data center head aches.
Not only have courts said it, it happens all the time. My wife (a human incarnation of Catbert) has fired maybe 20 people over the last decade because they lied on their application paperwork.
Normally it plays out that something questionable happens and the employee starts to get scrutinized. Then looky, looky, they lied on their application and are a problem. Time for security to walk them out of the building...
Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?
If the book was authored using federal funding, then publishers should not expect any level of protection; it isn't their work (or rather their "work-for-hire") to begin with. Any copyright protection to the publisher in this case should be based on that entity purchasing the rights from the funding agency (ideally at a valuation based on estimated future sales).
If they have been getting a better deal than that, then it's just a case of federally-funded corporate welfare.
Ever since the launch over a year ago we used VMware Server 1 for instantiating the YippieMove back-end software.
This says it all in one sentence. VMWare Server (as opposed to ESX or ESXi) is a dog. It barely ran with two WinXP installs and one RHEL5 on a 4-core server with 8 GB of RAM. Life was a little better after upgrading to VMWare Server 2, but running it on top of an OS instead of using a hypervisor kills performance. I switched the same box over to ESXi 3.5 and all three installs scream. Additionally, the memory page deduplication driver means that I have capacity for probably another five to seven lightly loaded systems without worrying about the occasional load spike.
As far as some jobs just not being well suited to virtualization, that's an obvious truth. However, most work in that class is CPU bound compute work. If you are not buying storage on a shoestring budget (i.e. you can run VMFS3 on a FC or trunked Gb SAN rather than fiddle with NFS) then you should have reasonable IO performance. The OP doesn't give any detail on storage performance (either in bandwidth or IOPS) so there's no way to tell what it requires. Having looked at his YippieMove service web page there doesn't seem to be a lot that is required. It seems like they picked the low performance, free VMWare tool and when it didn't work did something completely different. This says less about VMWare than it does about the OP's design/testing process.
If you're that picky or the project has tolerances that tight, order custom cables. I've specified cable lengths down to the inch from Ma href="http://www.fiberdyne.com/">Fiberdyne several times for reasonable prices; I figure it is worth more than a couple dollars per cable not to be going blind looking at twists and doing the TDR validation myself.
I've got to agree. I think most would agree that a huge stack of non-Linux, FOSS apps are already deeply embedded in the enterprise. If the post can't come up with a requirements document, there's nothing to be said.
Both of your points are true, but I think beside the point. I have more than a little experience at recommending and implementing policy. The CYA portion is true, but the goal is to protect the organization from legal liability often at the expense of those who would ignore policy.
Some individual (or perhaps in-duh-vidual) made each decision and is responsible to his/her supervisor. If someone chooses to be a prick and that is outside of policy (granted it may not be) then that person can be symbolically caned for their inappropriate actions.
And also businesses can hide behind an organization. When a company acts, it's not always entirely clear whether it's the decision of "the company" or the individual within the company. If I'm a manager and I want to make someone's life miserable, I can do that while justifying it as "policy" or "good for business". I can say, "Sorry, it's out of my hands. It's just policy." If the employee turns around and tries to make my life miserable, he can't hide behind his actions as easily.
It is always the decision of someone within the company. There is no self-aware corporate overlord wailing on its human drones. The correct question is "Is the action in accord with established corporate policy and if not who decided on the exception?" You can normally answer the first part with a polite conversation with someone in Human Resources, the Ombudsman's Office, or the Compliance Office. I must stress polite.
If the decision was outside of policy, then you can focus your decisions on possibly useful options (filing an internal complaint, whistle-blowing to law enforcement, retaining an attorney etc.).
This looks like the old Disneyland PeopleMover to me just with the cars separated. Hopefully the PRT will be a bit more reliable...
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy
on
Botnets As "eWMDs"
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Please read my post. I don't suggest that New Orleans civil society came apart due to a financial mess. Rather, people resorted to looting grocery stores for food and water when the tap stopped working and the refrigerator could no longer keep food from spoiling. Of course, there were other contributing factors (like the lack of law enforcement) but desperate people will do what it takes to survive. If the hypothetical Evil Hackers manage to cut water and/or power to a large, urban population, they will create desperation.
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy
on
Botnets As "eWMDs"
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If we think of mass-energy conversion in nuke plants, I would argue that some mass was destroyed (er, converted) to generate a portion of the electricity consumed in botnet attacks. Touche.
More generally, reread the article. They are trying to address a real, asymmetric threat. Some jack-off (or group of jack-offs) can cause measurable harm (counted in your favorite currency if nothing else) via DDoS attacks. That is a demonstrated fact. Estonia argues that their financial sector was largely off-line for three weeks due to (purportedly) coordinated DDoS attacks. If their assertion is correct (a point about which I am neutral), then that DDoS attack was as effective (arguably more effective) on the Estonian financial industry as the 9/11 attacks were on the U.S banking system. Think back to how crazy people were that Wall St. was essentially off-line.
In any case, it is hardly unreasonable to argue that DDoS attacks pose an effective asymmetric threat to certain industries. On the other hand, I am less than convinced that there are Evil Hackers out there capable of and planning to shut down water systems and power distribution. However, should it be possible and occur, think about how short a time it took for New Orleans civil society to disintegrate.
I took a look at the proposed California infrastructure plan. I suspect that part was drawn up by someone unfamiliar with the state.
Interstate 10 (east from Los Angeles through suburbia and on to Florida) is missing. That's a major commute corridor for 100 miles or so east of LA. Much more than I-80 between San Francisco and Sacramento.
Their layout for battery exchange stations looks to have been created by saying something like "every 40 miles on the few freeways we identify" instead of looking at population centers along those routes. This has them putting stations in Arvin and Buellton (two small towns) instead of Bakersfield and Santa Barbara (the population centers 20 miles down the road).
It never fails to amaze me how some people can throw up a "proposal" without thinking about the viability of that which they propose.
Given the near fanatical privacy concerns on Slashdot, I'm surprised nobody is screaming over this "recommendation." Imagine how valuable it would be to know every web site visited by "millions of people a day." Does anyone think the for-profit company isn't mining then reselling the lookup->client-ip information?
On a technical issue, how effective is their service? I've had hotel/hot-spot links that were proxying DNS queries regardless of my settings. It seems to me that unless you know that your ISP's DNS is way broken and that they aren't intercepting DNS queries, this is of questionable use.
I have to disagree here. I use RHEL5 on my office desktop, Fedora 8 for the server in my garage, a recent Ubuntu release on an old beater laptop, and used to run Sparc Debian (Sarge) on a variety of old Sun gear. I would say this gives me a fairly good understanding of the differences. Here's my unsolicited opinions
RHEL is not a superset version of Fedora. It is a release with a guarantee of 5 years of patch support. Fedora's lifetime is much shorter. Enterprise customers (hence the 'E' in RHEL) don't want to be constantly upgrading/validating new software revs.
If you want to play with cool, new hardware, don't use RHEL. By definition it is behind the curve on h/w support
RHEL goes to serious lengths to avoid including patent encumbered code that they haven't licensed. That means RPMForge if you want to play MP3's or anything else so encumbered. Fedora is a bit more inclusive.
Ubuntu is much friendlier if you want a MSWin replacement. It grabs/configures codecs and browser plugins easier than any other distro I've tried.
I loathe the Debian package management. I've used RPM's via Red Hat since 1997 and never had a problem though life got better with yum. Using apt-get or dpkg always felt like shaving with a broken beer bottle when compared to yum or up2date.
I'm trying not to be a troll here, but it sounds like very few of the voices here have recent experience in both areas.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Apple is still scarred from the mess they created in the mid 1990's. Who can forget their crystal clear lineup of systems
each of which had a variety of model numbers and frequently comparable configurations. It left the company so scared (and scarred) that you practically have to look up the serial number to tell how old a given box is.
This reminds me of a time we were in the field and our beer got unappetizingly warm. Due to the kind of work we were doing, we had plenty of liquid nitrogen but insufficient refrigerator space for our liquid refreshments. One evening a member of the team decided he wanted a very cold Guinness and so poured about 250 ml of liquid nitrogen into his glass of beer.
Of course the nitrogen changed state but the surprise (to us anyway) was that the gas caused the beer to freeze sightly slower that it foamed. Within a few seconds, there was a meter or so of frozen beer foam standing up out of the glass. It was completely undrinkable (being in solid form), but wasn't bad if eaten with a spoon; which had to happen quickly as it started to melt immediately.
Moral: Don't send a bunch of twenty-something researchers into the desert for weeks on end without proper cooling equipment.
Not so much. Those were created while this whole Internet thing was a DoD/DoE/NSF (and other TLA) plaything. Anyone expecting that there would be a neutral, internationally managed jurisdiction was being idealistic and/or naive.
The problem is that governments have an established interest in and right to set the ground rules within their respective jurisdictions. For most of the internet, that comes down to boxes in their physical territory and the relevant CcTLD. The US has a first-mover advantage (or headache) in that they also created the .ORG, .NET, .COM, .MIL, and .EDU zones and can make a reasonable jurisdictional claim to them.
This is also why I think the open registration for TLDs is a bad idea. These jurisdictional issues are complicated enough (and will likely require a treaty or two to work out) without corporations in one country registering a TLD from a registrar in another to use for business worldwide. It's similar to the problem that had to be worked out internationally as corporate legal fictions became the norm in international commerce.
I beg to differ. Amazon does not have a monopoly on *anything* other than the manufacture of Kindles. However, this is just one of many types of eReaders (the actual market in question). Their goal is to maximize profit but they have to work within the ecosystem of publishers, competing retailers, and devices.
Before you snort and storm off, think about this. Fifteen years ago, Amazon was a nothing upstart going against some of the biggest and laziest incumbent retailers (I'm talking about the handful of music and book chains that dominated distribution in the US). They won that round by offering buyers what they wanted at prices that were better. As a company, they are more aware than most about how vulnerable a large incumbent can be to changes in its ecosystem. They are trying to find a product that will keep them relevant a decade from now.
What Amazon is doing is insisting on a piece of the action as the reseller (which every reseller does) and something extra for the distribution of bits. As I said before, that distribution fee may not be reasonable by any particular person's definition and is a reasonable subject for debate. <aside> Anything more than 15% above their wholesale rates (an overhead charge) seems excessive to *me* </aside> However, the only opinion that matters here is that of the publisher considering using Amazon as an e-document distributor. If Amazon's cost structure allows that organization to meet its revenue goals while keeping prices down to something consumers will accept, then it is good enough. If not, then the publisher will do something else (go elsewhere, beat on Amazon to reduce their cut, etc.). My point is that the publisher is the only one with the historical data to decide if the money is right. Some will and some won't.
This is also not to say the users are not getting screwed. That is a different question and involves what is a reasonable price to pay for an electronic, possibly DRM infected version of content you can also buy in dead-tree format. I tend to think that $9 is unreasonable for a paperback (and unconscionable for an electronic version) of entertainment prose. The question here to consider is "Who is screwing the customer?" I tend to think there is enough greed in enough places (publishers, advertising agencies, agents, resellers, authors, etc.) to spread the blame widely and thinly.
There are two things to consider here
1.) Amazon is handling the distribution. If their formula is unreasonable, that is something to kick around but they do need to cover those costs.
2.) The publishers probably cannot "pop it in the mail" for less. The article's author is forgetting about or intentionally ignoring the printing costs.
At the end of the day, the question has to be "Is the publisher getting a better or worse return?" This article (and most others on this subject) neglect that issue entirely. It's easy to bash at Apple's or Amazon's costing formula. It's much harder (and would display a lot of the publishers' proprietary data) to discuss the real fiscal impact on the publishing industry.
So, this time the plan is to design a capsule-switched network with 2m capsules that, undoubtedly, will have a maximum weight. How long until someone realizes that efficiency would be improved if each packet, I mean capsule, could carry six times the cargo....
One of the more amusing blog entries from Sun engineers was a discussion of the amount of energy needed to completely fill a ZFS file system. A 128-bit address space isn't just optimistically big, it's "freaking huge!"
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_you
My daughter is almost three years-old. One of the most interesting things to observe is how she classifies her world. When she was 18 months old she would have classified a robot as sentient; she thought almost everything was alive (sort of a toddler version of pantheism). If it was a friendly robot, that would have put it in the realm of the three dogs and cat which she was already familiar with.
I tend to agree. Challenging this as a 1st Amendment issue is probably the weakest legal argument. It seems that the ex post facto violation would be stronger. Even more powerful would be to challenge this under the 5th amendment (unlawful taking) since property (in the form of legal, derivative works based on the public domain materials) is being rendered valueless.
Let's assume for a minute that the complaint is correct and that the school was remotely monitoring some set of students. (This might not be correct. Did the snapshot come from some public source like FaceBook?).
If it were my daughter's computer, I would not be talking about a class-action suit with a civil attorney. I would be sitting down at police HQ and the district attorney's office pursuing criminal charges against the individuals involved. They would need to face the felony charges that their behavior warranted. Once that was rolling, I would go after the individuals (not the district) for civil damages.
Why give a pass to the deep pockets? Simply because I don't want to have to look my neighbors in the face when a fractional point increase in their property taxes is required to pay a civil settlement that made me wealthy. I have no problems bankrupting the people who authorized and deployed the tech.
SPARC is still quite relevant; there are few things as nice as running a multi-threaded set of applications on the Sun Niagara chips. If I were a database software outfit I would want to make sure there were two architectures out there (IBM POWER and something else) focusing on enterprise performance rather than media creation/encoding.
Take a look. Is there anything in the Intel or AMD product pipeline that will get you 2 x 10 Gb ethernet, 64 thread pipelines, and 128 GB of RAM in a 1U box? Even better, the price is really competative with buying the same performance worth of x86 gear in multiple boxes by the time you think about rack space, cooling networking and all the rest of the data center head aches.
Not only have courts said it, it happens all the time. My wife (a human incarnation of Catbert) has fired maybe 20 people over the last decade because they lied on their application paperwork.
Normally it plays out that something questionable happens and the employee starts to get scrutinized. Then looky, looky, they lied on their application and are a problem. Time for security to walk them out of the building...
If the book was authored using federal funding, then publishers should not expect any level of protection; it isn't their work (or rather their "work-for-hire") to begin with. Any copyright protection to the publisher in this case should be based on that entity purchasing the rights from the funding agency (ideally at a valuation based on estimated future sales). If they have been getting a better deal than that, then it's just a case of federally-funded corporate welfare.
This says it all in one sentence. VMWare Server (as opposed to ESX or ESXi) is a dog. It barely ran with two WinXP installs and one RHEL5 on a 4-core server with 8 GB of RAM. Life was a little better after upgrading to VMWare Server 2, but running it on top of an OS instead of using a hypervisor kills performance. I switched the same box over to ESXi 3.5 and all three installs scream. Additionally, the memory page deduplication driver means that I have capacity for probably another five to seven lightly loaded systems without worrying about the occasional load spike.
As far as some jobs just not being well suited to virtualization, that's an obvious truth. However, most work in that class is CPU bound compute work. If you are not buying storage on a shoestring budget (i.e. you can run VMFS3 on a FC or trunked Gb SAN rather than fiddle with NFS) then you should have reasonable IO performance. The OP doesn't give any detail on storage performance (either in bandwidth or IOPS) so there's no way to tell what it requires. Having looked at his YippieMove service web page there doesn't seem to be a lot that is required. It seems like they picked the low performance, free VMWare tool and when it didn't work did something completely different. This says less about VMWare than it does about the OP's design/testing process.
If you're that picky or the project has tolerances that tight, order custom cables. I've specified cable lengths down to the inch from Ma href="http://www.fiberdyne.com/">Fiberdyne several times for reasonable prices; I figure it is worth more than a couple dollars per cable not to be going blind looking at twists and doing the TDR validation myself.
I've got to agree. I think most would agree that a huge stack of non-Linux, FOSS apps are already deeply embedded in the enterprise. If the post can't come up with a requirements document, there's nothing to be said.
Both of your points are true, but I think beside the point. I have more than a little experience at recommending and implementing policy. The CYA portion is true, but the goal is to protect the organization from legal liability often at the expense of those who would ignore policy.
Some individual (or perhaps in-duh-vidual) made each decision and is responsible to his/her supervisor. If someone chooses to be a prick and that is outside of policy (granted it may not be) then that person can be symbolically caned for their inappropriate actions.
It is always the decision of someone within the company. There is no self-aware corporate overlord wailing on its human drones. The correct question is "Is the action in accord with established corporate policy and if not who decided on the exception?" You can normally answer the first part with a polite conversation with someone in Human Resources, the Ombudsman's Office, or the Compliance Office. I must stress polite.
If the decision was outside of policy, then you can focus your decisions on possibly useful options (filing an internal complaint, whistle-blowing to law enforcement, retaining an attorney etc.).
This looks like the old Disneyland PeopleMover to me just with the cars separated. Hopefully the PRT will be a bit more reliable...
Please read my post. I don't suggest that New Orleans civil society came apart due to a financial mess. Rather, people resorted to looting grocery stores for food and water when the tap stopped working and the refrigerator could no longer keep food from spoiling. Of course, there were other contributing factors (like the lack of law enforcement) but desperate people will do what it takes to survive. If the hypothetical Evil Hackers manage to cut water and/or power to a large, urban population, they will create desperation.
If we think of mass-energy conversion in nuke plants, I would argue that some mass was destroyed (er, converted) to generate a portion of the electricity consumed in botnet attacks. Touche.
More generally, reread the article. They are trying to address a real, asymmetric threat. Some jack-off (or group of jack-offs) can cause measurable harm (counted in your favorite currency if nothing else) via DDoS attacks. That is a demonstrated fact. Estonia argues that their financial sector was largely off-line for three weeks due to (purportedly) coordinated DDoS attacks. If their assertion is correct (a point about which I am neutral), then that DDoS attack was as effective (arguably more effective) on the Estonian financial industry as the 9/11 attacks were on the U.S banking system. Think back to how crazy people were that Wall St. was essentially off-line.
In any case, it is hardly unreasonable to argue that DDoS attacks pose an effective asymmetric threat to certain industries. On the other hand, I am less than convinced that there are Evil Hackers out there capable of and planning to shut down water systems and power distribution. However, should it be possible and occur, think about how short a time it took for New Orleans civil society to disintegrate.
I took a look at the proposed California infrastructure plan. I suspect that part was drawn up by someone unfamiliar with the state.
It never fails to amaze me how some people can throw up a "proposal" without thinking about the viability of that which they propose.
Actually, it's all about sex. Invasion is always about stealing resources to make a particular leader more powerful (and thus more likely to reproduce).
It's also a great way to acquire distant territory to which you ship off excess kids.
Given the near fanatical privacy concerns on Slashdot, I'm surprised nobody is screaming over this "recommendation." Imagine how valuable it would be to know every web site visited by "millions of people a day." Does anyone think the for-profit company isn't mining then reselling the lookup->client-ip information?
On a technical issue, how effective is their service? I've had hotel/hot-spot links that were proxying DNS queries regardless of my settings. It seems to me that unless you know that your ISP's DNS is way broken and that they aren't intercepting DNS queries, this is of questionable use.
I have to disagree here. I use RHEL5 on my office desktop, Fedora 8 for the server in my garage, a recent Ubuntu release on an old beater laptop, and used to run Sparc Debian (Sarge) on a variety of old Sun gear. I would say this gives me a fairly good understanding of the differences. Here's my unsolicited opinions
I'm trying not to be a troll here, but it sounds like very few of the voices here have recent experience in both areas.