There's a reason all of the top 10 U.S. banks still keep all retail banking data on mainframes - it may be an outdated, outmoded platform, but it has decades of development and history. Everything has an audit log. Everything has non-repudiation.
That doesn't sound outmoded to me...
What they are is out of fashion to the "PC Generation" (the same people that share viruses like candy), but those are the stupid people, and there's nothing I can do about that.
The problem isn't forced upgrades (which don't exist), but rather the lack of browser fixes that will probably result from Win9x support being dropped from the mainstream FireFox tree.
As has been brought up before: since FF is OSS, it will only get abandoned if people want to abandon it.
Thus, a thundering herd of lawyers will not savagely decend upon you like a plague of locusts if you decide to branch off the last official 2.0.x tree and keep on applying security patches to it.
Obviously, five nines is better than four nines, exactly ten times better
No, that's not true..99999/.9999 = 1.0009009009
So, it's 0.09009% more uptime. Not worth writing home about unless you are a telco or a factory that (a) doesn't shut down for Christmas and (b) don't have clustered[0] redundancy.
[0] Which is why VMS is still controlling some factories: you can upgrade from VAX to Alpha to Itanium in a rotating fashion, always leaving at least on system up and running.
One example: our (commercial, expensive) database is stopped everyday at 3am and stays one full hour down for backup
Sounds crazy to me. A transaction based database, such as a properly written Postgres system, can safely be backed up while live, since the transactions prevent data becoming inconsistent during the backup.
Not only is it crazy, it's pathetic. Commercial databases have known how to do hot backups for 20 years.
Which brings up another point -- when HDD's are approaching the terabyte range, does it still make sense to use single large disks when they're inherently throttled to IDE or SATA IO rates?
Those huge-density 7200RPM drives are best for near-line and "online archival" storage. Perfect for SOX data retention.
Why not build your datacenter in alaska where it's colder year round.
Our datacenter in just up the Hudson from NYC and was built back in the 1960s, When IBM Ruled The Datacenter, and disk farms generated a lot of heat and the ambient temperature needed to be roughly 70F.
So, the DC is in the 2nd basement, and (had) vents to the outside, so cold winter air could be shunted into the room.
Became obsolete, though, in the mid 1990s when the huge 3390 farm was replaced by a couple of EMC cabinets and the bipolar mainframe was replaced with a CMOS s/390.
I'd have thought building the thing in Texas would just help pump up your A/C costs.
Depends on how well it's insulated. When the building is gutted, that's the perfect time to spray on insulation.
Can I interest you in a black market Canadian Loo?
The low-flow toilets seemed like a good iadea at the time, but if youhave to flush them 2, 3, 4 times, I would imagine you're not going to see much, if any, savings in water consumption.
It's especially aggrivating since I live within eyeshot of the largest river in North America.
Bragging about "only" 10 to 20 hours of downtime per year is for people who have bought into the whole "10 hours is 99.999% availability, which is excellent" midnset.
20 hours downtime per year is still 99.772% uptime, which is nothing to sneeze at.
1.5 hours per month scheduled off-peak downtime just doesn't matter, unless you are running a 24x365 application.
99.999% availability for ANY of the above services would be a disaster (nobody would accept having to reboot a toilet,or having to take it "offline" for a few hours during peak demand).
5 nines uptime is 5.25 minutes per year. My (low-flow) toilet has been clogged more than that this year.
Let's say your windows server is down for 30 hours in a particular year. That means it has an uptime of 8730/8760 or 99.66%. Your Linux server has 20% more downtime. That's 36 hours per year.
The "problem" with your analysis is that the article says:
20 percent more annual uptime
I put "problem" in quotes, because yours is the correct calculation. Either TechWeb or the Yankee Group screwed up the wording, changing the meaning of the sentence.
I've been following this thread on the list, and Towns' comment can only be taken as a threat if your adrenalin is pumping and your argument mode is set to Religion.
It depends on the software, but the Mac OS X Save As PDF most certainly does not just save an image inside the PDF. The text is fully selectable/searchable.
Some "things" are still a bit more important than others. "Things" like, say, justice.
In Utopia, justice does not require money.
In the Real World, justice requires lots of money.
The measure of how just a society is rests on whether that money must be spent by the Defendant because the police are underfunded and overworked and are trying to close the case as quickly as possible, or whether the money is spent on a fully funded, well-staffed, well trained police force that can take the time to find the real culprit in the first place.
As the amount of available data increases, the chances of being caught without an alibi decreases at essentially the same rate that coincidences increase.
I'd assert the total opposite: the more data there is, the more it's likely that one of those pieces of data can show where you were at the time of the alleged crime.
Or... pinpoint that you were in the area.
Also, you make it sound like investigators have no training or experience in weighting circumstantial evidence, or winnowing down a list of suspects, or differentiating between circumstantial evidence and direct evidence.
Sure, if the detective has not turned bitter and cynical, and has the time and resources, and doesn't have a backlog of other cases that he also has to investigate.
Spending money on a good lawyer should not be a prequisite of being innocent.
"Should" is the operative word. Even before the days of DNA banks and the USA PATRIOT Act, bad/lazy/stupid/overworked police and DAs could try innocent people and sometimes find them guilty.
So, I'd say that a good lawyer has always been necessary.
As the available amount of data increases, so do unfortunate coincidences. They get some guy on circumstantial evidence, he has no alibi, therefore he's guilty.
That's a definite problem. Which is why you'd better always get a good lawyer.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess but if I recall correctly hiroshima did a little bit more then just "blow in some curtains".
If Little Boy was detonated in the far northern mountains of Norway, it also would have had similar minimal effect.
Yup, fake, from a truck commercial (from Toyora I think?) meant to show how tough thier trucks are ;-)
Meteors don't trail a huge billowing cloud of smoke behind them.
How could anyone not think it's a fake?
Obviously daily use is the best thing, but it doesn't do you any good if you can't get your system up and running.
Any geek wannabe who can not get a modern GUI distro up and running should turn in his pocket protector and go bag groceries for the rest of his life.
I'm pretty sure root is disabled by default in ubuntu. So unless they used sudo to run SIGGRAPH, the system should be safe.
Sure, the system files are safe, but your files (and the information inside them) are not!
You would think that a bank, of all places, would not allow writable and removeable storage AT ALL
One word: terminal. If the bank employees only had a 3278 at their stations, such attacks would be impossible.
There's a reason all of the top 10 U.S. banks still keep all retail banking data on mainframes - it may be an outdated, outmoded platform, but it has decades of development and history. Everything has an audit log. Everything has non-repudiation.
That doesn't sound outmoded to me...
What they are is out of fashion to the "PC Generation" (the same people that share viruses like candy), but those are the stupid people, and there's nothing I can do about that.
As has been brought up before: since FF is OSS, it will only get abandoned if people want to abandon it.
Thus, a thundering herd of lawyers will not savagely decend upon you like a plague of locusts if you decide to branch off the last official 2.0.x tree and keep on applying security patches to it.
I NEED MUH FIREFOXEN!
There's no logic bomb that says that NEXT YEAR when FF 3.0 is realeased, FF 2.0.x suddenly stop running on Win98.
Obviously, five nines is better than four nines, exactly ten times better
.99999/.9999 = 1.0009009009
No, that's not true.
So, it's 0.09009% more uptime. Not worth writing home about unless you are a telco or a factory that (a) doesn't shut down for Christmas and (b) don't have clustered[0] redundancy.
[0] Which is why VMS is still controlling some factories: you can upgrade from VAX to Alpha to Itanium in a rotating fashion, always leaving at least on system up and running.
One example: our (commercial, expensive) database is stopped everyday at 3am and stays one full hour down for backup
Sounds crazy to me. A transaction based database, such as a properly written Postgres system, can safely be backed up while live, since the transactions prevent data becoming inconsistent during the backup.
Not only is it crazy, it's pathetic. Commercial databases have known how to do hot backups for 20 years.
I want my Really Important Data watched over by a mainframe.
Which brings up another point -- when HDD's are approaching the terabyte range, does it still make sense to use single large disks when they're inherently throttled to IDE or SATA IO rates?
Those huge-density 7200RPM drives are best for near-line and "online archival" storage. Perfect for SOX data retention.
For speed, you still want 10K 147GB SCSI drives.
Why not build your datacenter in alaska where it's colder year round.
Our datacenter in just up the Hudson from NYC and was built back in the 1960s, When IBM Ruled The Datacenter, and disk farms generated a lot of heat and the ambient temperature needed to be roughly 70F.
So, the DC is in the 2nd basement, and (had) vents to the outside, so cold winter air could be shunted into the room.
Became obsolete, though, in the mid 1990s when the huge 3390 farm was replaced by a couple of EMC cabinets and the bipolar mainframe was replaced with a CMOS s/390.
I'd have thought building the thing in Texas would just help pump up your A/C costs.
Depends on how well it's insulated. When the building is gutted, that's the perfect time to spray on insulation.
I lived in Houston for five years.
I live in Minnesota now.
This is no coincidence.
I live in New Orleans (same latitude as Houston) and much prefer it to having to shovel snow 4 months a year and live thru blizzards every year.
I feel your pain ...
Can I interest you in a black market Canadian Loo?
The low-flow toilets seemed like a good iadea at the time, but if youhave to flush them 2, 3, 4 times, I would imagine you're not going to see much, if any, savings in water consumption.
It's especially aggrivating since I live within eyeshot of the largest river in North America.
20 hours downtime per year is still 99.772% uptime, which is nothing to sneeze at.
1.5 hours per month scheduled off-peak downtime just doesn't matter, unless you are running a 24x365 application.
99.999% availability for ANY of the above services would be a disaster (nobody would accept having to reboot a toilet,or having to take it "offline" for a few hours during peak demand).
5 nines uptime is 5.25 minutes per year. My (low-flow) toilet has been clogged more than that this year.
The "problem" with your analysis is that the article says:
I put "problem" in quotes, because yours is the correct calculation. Either TechWeb or the Yankee Group screwed up the wording, changing the meaning of the sentence.
I've been following this thread on the list, and Towns' comment can only be taken as a threat if your adrenalin is pumping and your argument mode is set to Religion.
It depends on the software, but the Mac OS X Save As PDF most certainly does not just save an image inside the PDF. The text is fully selectable/searchable.
Same with files created by ps2pdf.
a rich blend of the most sociologically elite
This girl needs a serious dose of Prozac.
http://dogcow.atspace.com/photos/bleeder.jpg
Some "things" are still a bit more important than others. "Things" like, say, justice.
In Utopia, justice does not require money.
In the Real World, justice requires lots of money.
The measure of how just a society is rests on whether that money must be spent by the Defendant because the police are underfunded and overworked and are trying to close the case as quickly as possible, or whether the money is spent on a fully funded, well-staffed, well trained police force that can take the time to find the real culprit in the first place.
I'd assert the total opposite: the more data there is, the more it's likely that one of those pieces of data can show where you were at the time of the alleged crime.
Or... pinpoint that you were in the area.
Also, you make it sound like investigators have no training or experience in weighting circumstantial evidence, or winnowing down a list of suspects, or differentiating between circumstantial evidence and direct evidence.
Sure, if the detective has not turned bitter and cynical, and has the time and resources, and doesn't have a backlog of other cases that he also has to investigate.
Any "thing" that requires more money
Now, we just have to test the validity of the assertion that giant databases increase the incidence of wrongful accusations.
Spending money on a good lawyer should not be a prequisite of being innocent.
"Should" is the operative word. Even before the days of DNA banks and the USA PATRIOT Act, bad/lazy/stupid/overworked police and DAs could try innocent people and sometimes find them guilty.
So, I'd say that a good lawyer has always been necessary.
That's a definite problem. Which is why you'd better always get a good lawyer.