Until you get into how much of a PITA it is to run your own server. Making sure that your box doesn't get hacked, that all your security fixes are in place, that a virus doesn't wipe you out.
Been there, done that and the $60/year that I spend for a host is well worth it.
I wish the various cable/DSL router companies would randomize the 3rd octet. Right now, they like to default to 192.168.0.x.
On a strange note, our internal corporate network is 192.0.1.x - which was setup a long time ago (prior to my tenure) and which hasn't been worth changing yet. At least we're finally the point where we use DHCP for everything and static DNS entries instead of IPs so if I ever do decide to actually switch it won't be as difficult.
I'm assuming that you're talking a small company with 50 internal machines?
Why do you need 50 public routable IPs for a small company? (Assuming this is not a hosting provider or ISP that is re-selling address space?)
Does a plumbing company / customer service center / insurance office run servers on every one of the 50 workstations that people outside the company need to access? (If so... why?)
At least with a paper audit trail there can be physical evidence of vote disposal. A group in a room behind closed doors might manage to dispose of a handful, or even in an open-forum if they're good magicians.
Disposing of hundreds / thousands / tends of thousands of paper votes is a bit trickier if you don't want to be discovered.
Paper is good because we have centuries of experience in knowing how to secure a paper audit trail. Experience that probably shouldn't be thrown out (baby with the bathwater) just to implement some new cool digital voting technology.
it must be made illegal to coerce anyone to reveal their GUID
Nice try... but someone holding a gun to your child/wife/relation's head doesn't really care about legal vs illegal already. Heck, someone who's willing to say they'll pay you X to vote for Y is already past the point of caring about whether it's legal for you to show them how you voted. Laws only keep honest people honest.
The only suggestion that I've seen possible would be a MD5 hash of your vote (probably seeded in some manner). However, how is the end-user supposed to know how the MD5 hash was calculated? The signature just says that *somevalue* was signed, and if you give people enough information to backtrack from the signature to what votes were actually recorded, we're back in the land of the non-anonymous vote with the ability to pay/threaten people to vote a particular way.
The problem with giving a voter a receipt that they can leave with (or show to others) is that you've now enabled corruption.
If the voter can show someone else proof of how they voted, 2 things can happen:
- voter gets paid if they can show they voted for a particular line item
- voter can be threatened to vote for a particular line item or have bad things happen
One suggestion for cases where you expect to have read-back errors on the backup medium is to add additional information that will let you recover data even if some of the data is corrupt. So by adding 20% to the amount of data you're backing up, you'll be able to fully recover all of the data as long as no more then (roughly) 15% of the data is bad. (The extra 5% is overhead for the recovery files.)
Right now, QuickPar is one of the more popular solutions. There are command line version and the tool is open-source. I've been using it to protect stuff that I'm off-loading onto CD-R/DVD-R.
And unfortunately, since e-mail FROM addresses tend to be forged, you're spamming some poor joe with your challenge messages. (Or else you're generating an e-mail that's going to bounce.)
C/R systems just push the problem around... if the from domain could be trusted (ala one of the reverse-MX proposals), C/R systems would be a smarter bet.
Joe-jobs and domain forging are at least combatable via technology. It merely requires that the DNS system provide answers to the two following questions:
1) Has this domain restricted which IPs are allowed to send e-mail on behalf of this domain?
2) Is the IP address of the server that is currently talking to my SMTP server on that list?
There are at least (4) proposals on the table currently (see my signature) for eliminating the ability to forge domains. It won't solve the spam problem, but it will at least put a serious dent in the problem.
Norton Ghost used to be (still is?) licensed on a per-machine that you used it on basis. Which is another silly licensing scheme - although I'm not sure what a good setup would be. (Probably allowing you to use it on 10 machines per license?)
And also very dishonest / non-respectful way to treat your (future) customers.
30-day trial editions are good when they clearly indicate that they won't work past some date (and remind the user as that date approaches).
Registration keys that are simply tied to a specific person are also good (where you enter the reg key, the username and e-mail address) - because they tie the license to an individual person/corporation I'm not going to let every Tom Dick and Harry borrow my key (or post it somewhere online).
Product activation that is tied to a specific machine does not make me a happy user. While I currently use WinXP Pro on 2 of my systems and a copy of OfficeXP on one system, the PA-scheme is onerous enough that I'm actively seeking alternatives such as Mac or Linux or OpenOffice.
Putting PA in a product where it's tied to a specific machine tells me that it's time to start looking for other vendor software to fill that niche.
When I first stopped watching TV, right after the OJ Simpson car chase, whatever year that was, people treated me to everything from incredulity to ridicule about it. Almost no-one was able to simply accept the idea that I literally didn't watch TV, didn't own one, didn't feel like it was missing.
Growing up in the 80s, I had a high school teacher who's family didn't own a TV. Naturally, we all thought they were nuts because they were missing all of the shows. (This was even a bit before my family could afford a VCR to time-shift stuff.) We just couldn't concieve of the idea of life without TV (heck, we didn't even have *cable* TV, just the 5 - or 7 if the weather was good - broadcast channels. Envy for me was my friends who had cable TV and even HBO.
Now I'm one of those people, while not quite to the point of not owning a TV at all, who doesn't watch network or cable TV. (If it ain't on DVD and I'm not traveling on business, I'm probably not gonna see it.) Like fishbowl, back when I switched off TV a few years back (early 90s), people were still boggled by the idea. Only TV I see is if I'm at a friend's house or on the road staying at a hotel.
OTOH, I think people are more used to the idea of someone not watching TV then just a few years ago. Naturally, that leaves the weather as pretty much the only topic to talk about when meeting complete strangers...
About every few months, I consider calling up the cable company and getting them to come out and install service. That usually lasts until I make a trip to the local used bookstore, or I find another tech that catches my eye that I spend a few weeks boning up on, or I order a few DVDs, or spend an evening reading slashdot at a low filter level.
One of the Txx stations (TBS? TNT?) had a *really* bad habit of doing the "few commercials to start, lots of commercials at the end" when showing a movie.
To start with, they'd show the movie over a 3 hour block (since most flicks are 90-120 min of content, that's a guaranteed 60-90 minutes of ads). First ad break wouldn't be until 20 minutes into the movie, so you'd get hooked. During the 3rd hour, they start breaking to commercial as often as possible, sometimes for only 1 or 2 commercials.
I thought the old standard was 12 min per hour of commercial time? Back when I collected TV shows (few years back), once I stripped out commercials I could fit 5 of them on a 2 hour VHS tape. (24 min per 1/2 hour episode) However, I think the Babylon 5 DVD episodes are only 42 minutes.
And in Moria/Angband... "I cast magic missle at the big 'D' that keeps changing colors!" (An RPG doesn't have to have graphics, but most people want flash and sizzle.)
Big advantage of DM'd games is that a good DM can be flexible with the script... online MMORPGs don't have that ability, there's only so many logic paths that the programmers can come up with.
Unfortunately, although I played with my roomates in college, I've never been able to join a RL RPG group because my schedule is too chaotic.
Ah well, time to WoR back down to 2200' to beat up on some more Ancient Dragons.
That's about when I stopped watching TV (unsubscribed from CableTV, and I can't even get any of the local stations on my antenae).
For me it was the realization (back when I was making half of what I make today) that I was paying $30/mo for something I was only watching a few hours per week. That, and working 60-80 hour weeks...
Now I either get the episodes off the net or buy the series on DVD. Or I might watch TV in the evenings when I'm staying at a hotel on a business trip.
There's just too much *other* stuff to fill my time (even with no longer working 60-80 hour weeks!). Used book store around the corner, open-source projects, playing computer games (did the EQ thing for about 18mo), watching movies/shows, or just browsing the net trying to bone up on MySQL (this month's project... next month is SuSE).
Now imagine how cool it is when that info on your dietary habits gets fed back to your insurance companies so they can charge you more for eating unhealthy foods...
I have a 6x75Gb RAID5 (Promise SX6000 card), net space is 275Gb in the data partition (O/S is running on an 8Gb partition).
So far, I've lose the entire array once in just 6 months. Win2000 decided to randomly corrupt about 1/10th of the files on the disk.
Hmmm, having a 275Gb single drive is nice because you don't have to worry about where to put stuff... but I'm not sure I'd do it again as one big drive. I think the next setup is going to be mini-ITX servers, each with a 120-180Gb RAID1 remote mounted into a central server (DFS or equivalent). That way if I lose a server, I only lose part of the storage space.
For off-site backups, I use 120Gb USB drives. I get the enclosures where the power-supply is built in (uses a standard power cord) because that's one less thing to keep track of and move around with the drive. Proprietary power blocks are a real pain if you lose them or they go dead. I'm also looking into the mini 2.5" USB drives that don't require a power supply at all, use laptop drives which are sturdier.
Summary of my setup:
ServerA - 275Gb RAID5, twin 120Gb USB drives
ServerB - 75Gb RAID1, twin 60Gb USB drives
I'm still debating getting a 20-40Gb tape, but for the price of tapes, I can buy external USB drives of the same capacity...
Not really... while it extends the lifespan it usually also results in lower birthrates. Population stability requires a rate of 1.0 births for every death. Higher tech countries usually have rates in the 0.8-1.2 range, but go to the third world, where you don't have medtech like birth control and birth rates are well above 1.0 (sometimes as high as 3.0 as a guess).
There was an article about Japan a few years back, a country with arguably a goodish amount of medical technology. The problem they're having is that the birth rate is below 1.0, which means that their population is slowly shrinking.
Except that if the GPL falls, copyright law takes over... which means open season on SCO's use of all that copyrighted code in their distro. (Just because you release something under GPL, doesn't mean that you give up your copyright on the code... you're granting *extra* rights for people to distribute... take away the GPL, and you only take away those extra rights that you granted.)
RMS will probably come up with GPL v3 that addresses the issue and everyone re-licenses under that, or everyone switches to one of the other (dozens) of open-source licenses.
So on the high end, if you are looking for performance, a laptop blows this away. If you are looking for portability, a PDA easily wins. PDA's will give you easily 4-5 hours on battery as well as WiFi and/or Bluetooth wireless access. As well as cost 1/8 the price.
Only 4-5 hours? Thanks but no thanks... my PDA gets 3 days before I have to put it back on the charge cradle. Which is about the minimum amount of battery life that I find acceptable from a PDA (my Palm III went for 2-4 weeks on a single set of batteries).
The big problem with places like PHP.NET, MySQL docs (with the user comments) is that there is no way for the comminity to indicate which posts are good/bad.
A good system might be the scoring system that Allakhazam uses. Initially, your comments on things are rated at a score of 2.00, and anyone who has an account can mod your comment up/down (1.00 is the lowest score, 5.00 is the highest, default filter is to hide comments under 1.50). As you get more and more posts rated at higher levels, your initial posting score gets higher.
Slashdot Mirror
Some chick thinks she's an ordinary chick living in an ordinary world
Eh? The major always knew she was un-ordinary (e.g. mostly cyborg).
The monologues were partly reflections on whether or not she was still human, but mostly the concept of whether monoculture is viable for a lifeform.
NAT sucks. I want to be able to reach any computer on my LAN from the outside by its own IP address.
... and so do the black-hats.
Are you positive that you've properly configured your firewall and that all of your internal computers are properly secured?
Until you get into how much of a PITA it is to run your own server. Making sure that your box doesn't get hacked, that all your security fixes are in place, that a virus doesn't wipe you out.
Been there, done that and the $60/year that I spend for a host is well worth it.
I wish the various cable/DSL router companies would randomize the 3rd octet. Right now, they like to default to 192.168.0.x.
On a strange note, our internal corporate network is 192.0.1.x - which was setup a long time ago (prior to my tenure) and which hasn't been worth changing yet. At least we're finally the point where we use DHCP for everything and static DNS entries instead of IPs so if I ever do decide to actually switch it won't be as difficult.
I'm assuming that you're talking a small company with 50 internal machines?
Why do you need 50 public routable IPs for a small company? (Assuming this is not a hosting provider or ISP that is re-selling address space?)
Does a plumbing company / customer service center / insurance office run servers on every one of the 50 workstations that people outside the company need to access? (If so... why?)
At least with a paper audit trail there can be physical evidence of vote disposal. A group in a room behind closed doors might manage to dispose of a handful, or even in an open-forum if they're good magicians.
Disposing of hundreds / thousands / tends of thousands of paper votes is a bit trickier if you don't want to be discovered.
Paper is good because we have centuries of experience in knowing how to secure a paper audit trail. Experience that probably shouldn't be thrown out (baby with the bathwater) just to implement some new cool digital voting technology.
it must be made illegal to coerce anyone to reveal their GUID
Nice try... but someone holding a gun to your child/wife/relation's head doesn't really care about legal vs illegal already. Heck, someone who's willing to say they'll pay you X to vote for Y is already past the point of caring about whether it's legal for you to show them how you voted. Laws only keep honest people honest.
The only suggestion that I've seen possible would be a MD5 hash of your vote (probably seeded in some manner). However, how is the end-user supposed to know how the MD5 hash was calculated? The signature just says that *somevalue* was signed, and if you give people enough information to backtrack from the signature to what votes were actually recorded, we're back in the land of the non-anonymous vote with the ability to pay/threaten people to vote a particular way.
The problem with giving a voter a receipt that they can leave with (or show to others) is that you've now enabled corruption.
If the voter can show someone else proof of how they voted, 2 things can happen:
- voter gets paid if they can show they voted for a particular line item
- voter can be threatened to vote for a particular line item or have bad things happen
One suggestion for cases where you expect to have read-back errors on the backup medium is to add additional information that will let you recover data even if some of the data is corrupt. So by adding 20% to the amount of data you're backing up, you'll be able to fully recover all of the data as long as no more then (roughly) 15% of the data is bad. (The extra 5% is overhead for the recovery files.)
Right now, QuickPar is one of the more popular solutions. There are command line version and the tool is open-source. I've been using it to protect stuff that I'm off-loading onto CD-R/DVD-R.
And unfortunately, since e-mail FROM addresses tend to be forged, you're spamming some poor joe with your challenge messages. (Or else you're generating an e-mail that's going to bounce.)
C/R systems just push the problem around... if the from domain could be trusted (ala one of the reverse-MX proposals), C/R systems would be a smarter bet.
Possibly under a fraud law?
Joe-jobs and domain forging are at least combatable via technology. It merely requires that the DNS system provide answers to the two following questions:
1) Has this domain restricted which IPs are allowed to send e-mail on behalf of this domain?
2) Is the IP address of the server that is currently talking to my SMTP server on that list?
There are at least (4) proposals on the table currently (see my signature) for eliminating the ability to forge domains. It won't solve the spam problem, but it will at least put a serious dent in the problem.
Norton Ghost used to be (still is?) licensed on a per-machine that you used it on basis. Which is another silly licensing scheme - although I'm not sure what a good setup would be. (Probably allowing you to use it on 10 machines per license?)
Which is one of the main reasons that OSI projects are gaining ground year after year.
Data locked into a proprietary format does nothing for the end-user, but everything for the vendor because of the network effect.
That's pretty user-hostile.
And also very dishonest / non-respectful way to treat your (future) customers.
30-day trial editions are good when they clearly indicate that they won't work past some date (and remind the user as that date approaches).
Registration keys that are simply tied to a specific person are also good (where you enter the reg key, the username and e-mail address) - because they tie the license to an individual person/corporation I'm not going to let every Tom Dick and Harry borrow my key (or post it somewhere online).
Product activation that is tied to a specific machine does not make me a happy user. While I currently use WinXP Pro on 2 of my systems and a copy of OfficeXP on one system, the PA-scheme is onerous enough that I'm actively seeking alternatives such as Mac or Linux or OpenOffice.
Putting PA in a product where it's tied to a specific machine tells me that it's time to start looking for other vendor software to fill that niche.
When I first stopped watching TV, right after the OJ Simpson car chase, whatever year that was, people treated me to everything from incredulity to ridicule about it. Almost no-one was able to simply accept the idea that I literally didn't watch TV, didn't own one, didn't feel like it was missing.
Growing up in the 80s, I had a high school teacher who's family didn't own a TV. Naturally, we all thought they were nuts because they were missing all of the shows. (This was even a bit before my family could afford a VCR to time-shift stuff.) We just couldn't concieve of the idea of life without TV (heck, we didn't even have *cable* TV, just the 5 - or 7 if the weather was good - broadcast channels. Envy for me was my friends who had cable TV and even HBO.
Now I'm one of those people, while not quite to the point of not owning a TV at all, who doesn't watch network or cable TV. (If it ain't on DVD and I'm not traveling on business, I'm probably not gonna see it.) Like fishbowl, back when I switched off TV a few years back (early 90s), people were still boggled by the idea. Only TV I see is if I'm at a friend's house or on the road staying at a hotel.
OTOH, I think people are more used to the idea of someone not watching TV then just a few years ago. Naturally, that leaves the weather as pretty much the only topic to talk about when meeting complete strangers...
About every few months, I consider calling up the cable company and getting them to come out and install service. That usually lasts until I make a trip to the local used bookstore, or I find another tech that catches my eye that I spend a few weeks boning up on, or I order a few DVDs, or spend an evening reading slashdot at a low filter level.
One of the Txx stations (TBS? TNT?) had a *really* bad habit of doing the "few commercials to start, lots of commercials at the end" when showing a movie.
To start with, they'd show the movie over a 3 hour block (since most flicks are 90-120 min of content, that's a guaranteed 60-90 minutes of ads). First ad break wouldn't be until 20 minutes into the movie, so you'd get hooked. During the 3rd hour, they start breaking to commercial as often as possible, sometimes for only 1 or 2 commercials.
I thought the old standard was 12 min per hour of commercial time? Back when I collected TV shows (few years back), once I stripped out commercials I could fit 5 of them on a 2 hour VHS tape. (24 min per 1/2 hour episode) However, I think the Babylon 5 DVD episodes are only 42 minutes.
"I cast magic missile...at the darkness!"
And in Moria/Angband... "I cast magic missle at the big 'D' that keeps changing colors!" (An RPG doesn't have to have graphics, but most people want flash and sizzle.)
Big advantage of DM'd games is that a good DM can be flexible with the script... online MMORPGs don't have that ability, there's only so many logic paths that the programmers can come up with.
Unfortunately, although I played with my roomates in college, I've never been able to join a RL RPG group because my schedule is too chaotic.
Ah well, time to WoR back down to 2200' to beat up on some more Ancient Dragons.
That's about when I stopped watching TV (unsubscribed from CableTV, and I can't even get any of the local stations on my antenae).
For me it was the realization (back when I was making half of what I make today) that I was paying $30/mo for something I was only watching a few hours per week. That, and working 60-80 hour weeks...
Now I either get the episodes off the net or buy the series on DVD. Or I might watch TV in the evenings when I'm staying at a hotel on a business trip.
There's just too much *other* stuff to fill my time (even with no longer working 60-80 hour weeks!). Used book store around the corner, open-source projects, playing computer games (did the EQ thing for about 18mo), watching movies/shows, or just browsing the net trying to bone up on MySQL (this month's project... next month is SuSE).
Computer games are only a quarter of the story...
Now imagine how cool it is when that info on your dietary habits gets fed back to your insurance companies so they can charge you more for eating unhealthy foods...
I have a 6x75Gb RAID5 (Promise SX6000 card), net space is 275Gb in the data partition (O/S is running on an 8Gb partition).
So far, I've lose the entire array once in just 6 months. Win2000 decided to randomly corrupt about 1/10th of the files on the disk.
Hmmm, having a 275Gb single drive is nice because you don't have to worry about where to put stuff... but I'm not sure I'd do it again as one big drive. I think the next setup is going to be mini-ITX servers, each with a 120-180Gb RAID1 remote mounted into a central server (DFS or equivalent). That way if I lose a server, I only lose part of the storage space.
For off-site backups, I use 120Gb USB drives. I get the enclosures where the power-supply is built in (uses a standard power cord) because that's one less thing to keep track of and move around with the drive. Proprietary power blocks are a real pain if you lose them or they go dead. I'm also looking into the mini 2.5" USB drives that don't require a power supply at all, use laptop drives which are sturdier.
Summary of my setup:
ServerA - 275Gb RAID5, twin 120Gb USB drives
ServerB - 75Gb RAID1, twin 60Gb USB drives
I'm still debating getting a 20-40Gb tape, but for the price of tapes, I can buy external USB drives of the same capacity...
Not really... while it extends the lifespan it usually also results in lower birthrates. Population stability requires a rate of 1.0 births for every death. Higher tech countries usually have rates in the 0.8-1.2 range, but go to the third world, where you don't have medtech like birth control and birth rates are well above 1.0 (sometimes as high as 3.0 as a guess).
There was an article about Japan a few years back, a country with arguably a goodish amount of medical technology. The problem they're having is that the birth rate is below 1.0, which means that their population is slowly shrinking.
Except that if the GPL falls, copyright law takes over... which means open season on SCO's use of all that copyrighted code in their distro. (Just because you release something under GPL, doesn't mean that you give up your copyright on the code... you're granting *extra* rights for people to distribute... take away the GPL, and you only take away those extra rights that you granted.)
RMS will probably come up with GPL v3 that addresses the issue and everyone re-licenses under that, or everyone switches to one of the other (dozens) of open-source licenses.
Even if MS buys out SCO and drops SCO's charges against IBM, it still doesn't get rid of the counter-suit that IBM has filed against SCO.
Something tells me that if MS bought SCO... snowballs chance in hell that IBM would drop the counter-suit.
So on the high end, if you are looking for performance, a laptop blows this away. If you are looking for portability, a PDA easily wins. PDA's will give you easily 4-5 hours on battery as well as WiFi and/or Bluetooth wireless access. As well as cost 1/8 the price.
Only 4-5 hours? Thanks but no thanks... my PDA gets 3 days before I have to put it back on the charge cradle. Which is about the minimum amount of battery life that I find acceptable from a PDA (my Palm III went for 2-4 weeks on a single set of batteries).
The big problem with places like PHP.NET, MySQL docs (with the user comments) is that there is no way for the comminity to indicate which posts are good/bad.
A good system might be the scoring system that Allakhazam uses. Initially, your comments on things are rated at a score of 2.00, and anyone who has an account can mod your comment up/down (1.00 is the lowest score, 5.00 is the highest, default filter is to hide comments under 1.50). As you get more and more posts rated at higher levels, your initial posting score gets higher.