There was a similar problem back in the MS-DOS / OS/2 / Win95 days. MS-DOS only supported 8.3 filenames, OS/2 and Win95 supported long filenames - but differed in how they stored them in the FAT tables.
End result was a lot of files named SPREAD~1.WK3...
MetaData belongs in the file, not in the file-system.
For many of us, this is why we do not yet own DVDs or HDTV... you only wonder if for a premium price your paying to have them control your viewing habits...
What? One of the reasons that I own DVDs is that I can't stand the drivel that's on TV. Plus, it lets me watch stuff when I want to watch it. (How do DVDs control your viewing habits?)
I consume my media on my schedule at my convenience... that's what I don't think the networks have figured out yet. PVR/VHS lets me time shift, MP3s let me listen to music without having to manage hundreds of physical CDs.
Also, the punishment for this copyright infringement was really disporportionate to the 'crime'
That pretty well sums it up as to why people despise the RIAA sue-everyone approach. They're applying laws designed to tackle heavy-duty pirating for profit (think mafia / yakuza) to individuals. Those penalties were designed to be severe enough to put a criminal organization on the rocks.
There are only a few legitimate uses of music sharing:
- getting digital copies of music that you already own
- sampling new music
You should be required to take your driver's test every 5 years. Fail the test, be forced to take 5 hours of remedial class and come back before 30 days are up.
Testing should probably include some objective measures of physical/cognitive ability. Reaction time, eyesight, hearing.
Post age 70, testing should probably be done every 2-3 years.
Sounds like one of the concepts that David Brin uses in his Uplift series books.
In Sundiver, there's a mention that the gov't has to use up an "allowance" in order to hush up an affair. Meaning that the gov't is only allowed to keep a certain number of things secret at any time.
In Earth, everyone spies on everyone else. Elderly folks have taken up the hobby of watching others and the government. The gov't is not allowed to have secrets (nobody is).
Add metadata to the system that allows a destination SMTP server to determine wether a piece of inbound e-mail is authenticated, anonymous or forged.
Right now, a destination SMTP server has no (reliable) way to tell whether the FROM: domain is forged, the entire FROM: address is forged.
A first step would be to give domain admins the control over which hosts are allowed to send e-mail out on behalf of their domain. (Eliminate joe jobs.) This is what the reverse MX proposals attempt to do (DMP, DRIP, SMTP+SPF, RMX). It answers (2) basic questions: Has the domain admin locked their domain down to a limited number of hosts that are allowed to send e-mail on behalf of that domain. Is the host that is currently trying to talk to my mail server on that list? Poorly administered domains will have loose/missing RMX information, and your server may choose to delay/reject/question e-mail from a domain like that. (Nice part is that reverse-MX is opt-in and puts control in the hands of the local admins.) You can still be anonymous under this system.
Second step is authenticated sender stuff. Where you have to present credentials to the outbound SMTP server and your e-mail gets signed with your credentials. Implementation costs are a good bit higher and you get into the issue of key security, biometrics, etc... That's not to say that it's impossible to be anonymous under this system, there will still be domains that don't authenticate their senders.
A big problem in today's spam fight is that real spam is forged 6 ways from Sunday. If we can at least tell that e-mail is forged, it makes it easier to fight.
For that amount of data being bandied around, I'm pretty sure you'd want to go with Gigabit Ethernet instead of 100Mbps Ethernet. Cheapest GigE switches that I can think of right now are around $2k each, and the better (large frame support) GigE NICs are $300 each.
Realistic costs per gigabyte of secondary level storage are still up in the $2-$3 range. Which is more like $2-$3 million for a petabyte of secondary storage.
Primary storage costs are up around $10-$15 per gigabyte (not including backup costs).
1 order of magnitude if it's software that you're writing to run on your own system...
2 orders of magnitude if you're trying to write software that will run on multiple systems.
3 orders of magnitude if you're trying to write software to run on other people's systems (i.e. customers).
Do I program for KDE, or X, or somethingelse? What libraries am I depending on? Can I count on them being there? Do I have to distribut them?... rinse repeat.
Bah... get the (8) drive external case from Promise. Put (8) IDE drives in and hook it to a SCSI card in your system.
Without hot spare, you'll probably see 2Tb.
Promise does make a (6) port ATA/100 raid card. Biggest problem is that unless you go with a $500 server case (like the wide/fat Dell Poweredge 4300 style), the IDE cables have a tough time reaching the upper drive bays in the case.
Their (6) port SATA raid card makes that more of a moot point since SATA cables are (IIRC) 1m in length instead of a measly 18".
Price for a 120Gb external USB drive is somewhere around $180.
The AIT2 tapes that we buy hold something like 50/130Gb for $60/tape. Tape drive cost $900 or so.
Advantage of tapes is that they're small, they fit in a fire safe, it's easy to take them off-site. But they're a bear to work with if you only need to pull a few files back off the tape.
We now run a 2-tier backup system... The AIT2 backs up every night and goes in the fire safe. A second backup ends up on a external USB drive. We've considered getting (3) drives and doing a weekly shuffle (live goes off-site, off-site comes back and sits off-line, oldest drive gets put back online).
For the home user / small office... external USB/firewire drives are a very reasonable method of backup.
Get a $10-$20 therm with a sensor lead and check out the temperatures that you're running your hard drives at. Interior case temp should be between 35C and 40C (maybe as high as 45C...).
$20 worth of cooling fan works wonders... my preferred cooling fan for hard drives is one that takes up (2) 5.25" bays, has a single 60mm fan and holds (3) 3.5" HDs. (Although it's best if you only put (2) HDs in there so that there's a good air gap.)
If you're putting HDs inside of external USB drive cases - don't put 7200rpm drives in cases that don't have active cooling. I try to stick with 5400rpm drives for secondary storage (like USB/firewire attached devices) because they run cooler.
Basically, heat will kill a drive faster then dropping it.
My impression of Linux/Unix systems has always been that each host has it's own set of user accounts and if I have 3 hosts it means that I have to maintain 3 sets of passwords. With NT4/Win2000, my servers share a common userspace so that you only have to maintain a single user account. Is there something under Linux/Unix that does this?
How easy is it to drop a Samba server into an existing Win2000 network? Our Novell 5 server is starting to show it's age (file/printing only) and I'm starting to wonder whether to move to a later version of Novell, switch to Linux/Samba, use a NAS device, or just load up another Win2000 server.
(With the security issues this year with Windows, however, I'm not sure I want to make Windows our main file server.)
I know a developer who did the same sort of thing in an initialization routine for a program he was writing for a customer. The first draft of the software that he showed them took around a minute to initialize all of the data tables/etc.
When he was done writing the application, he removed the delay loop from the code and the system now initialized within 15-20 seconds.
His reasoning was that it gave the customer something concrete to complain about during development... hopefully reducing the number of other absurd change requests.
A few months ago, I picked up Medal of Honor: Allied Assault because I was in the market for a FPS and had heard decent things about it.
Loading up the Normandy Beach assult scenario... I'm not sure that I would've been able to face something like that in real life. While merely a game... perhaps not that realistic... it still enables me to mentally step into the boots of a grunt for a little bit and reflect on just how nasty a business it was.
I also switched to Mozilla when 1.4 came out (think I saw the announcement here on/.). Once Thunderbird and Firebird get a bit more mature I'll make the jump again. A lot of the users at work are still using old versions of Netscape 4.x for browsing/e-mail -- we'll be upgrading them as well.
Took me a week or two to get comfortable... change some things around (I like tabs to open up in the background for instance). Now I'm hooked on tabbed browsing and can't imagine going back to IE's individual windows.
Biggest complaint that I have at the moment is that right-clicking on a tab, it's too easy to hit the "close all other tabs" choice... and I don't know if there's a way to get a confirmation. Been trying to train my fingers to use Ctrl-W instead.
Same concept as DRIP, DMP and RMX... only difference is that SMTP+SPF folks are late to the game at even *starting* to write an IETF draft. (Some of the other proposals are on their 3rd or 4th drafts already.)
Any reverse MX system needs to answer 2 questions:
1. Does the source domain have a reverse MX listing/policy?
2. Is the IP of the server that's attempting to send me e-mail on behalf of a domain listed in that reverse MX entry?
Your e-mail provider will either make it possible for you to send mail or lose your business to someone who will...
Or, if you own the domain, set your reverse MX records to allow you to send e-mail from any IP address. (However, loosely defined IP ranges have a high chance that the destination mail server will score you more towards a spam domain then a ham domain.)
Yours is an easy solution... if you want to run your own mail server, then register a domain and configure your reverse MX records as needed.
Hosting services will follow the money trail... which means that if a customer needs an outbound SMTP server, they'll provide one or lose the business.
Agreed... work e-mail should be routed through your company's mail server. Either by authenticated/encrypted SMTP or by using a VPN tunnel to connect into your company's network.
(The latter situation is the one we use... because employees already have to get access to files and intranet web applications if they want to get work done.)
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There was a similar problem back in the MS-DOS / OS/2 / Win95 days. MS-DOS only supported 8.3 filenames, OS/2 and Win95 supported long filenames - but differed in how they stored them in the FAT tables.
End result was a lot of files named SPREAD~1.WK3...
MetaData belongs in the file, not in the file-system.
And the ads on NPR are typically from companies in the local area, companies that I have a good regard for and don't mind hearing mentions for.
Plus, NPR ads are understated rather then in-your-face obnoxious like commercial TV/radio.
For many of us, this is why we do not yet own DVDs or HDTV... you only wonder if for a premium price your paying to have them control your viewing habits...
What? One of the reasons that I own DVDs is that I can't stand the drivel that's on TV. Plus, it lets me watch stuff when I want to watch it. (How do DVDs control your viewing habits?)
I consume my media on my schedule at my convenience... that's what I don't think the networks have figured out yet. PVR/VHS lets me time shift, MP3s let me listen to music without having to manage hundreds of physical CDs.
Also, the punishment for this copyright infringement was really disporportionate to the 'crime'
That pretty well sums it up as to why people despise the RIAA sue-everyone approach. They're applying laws designed to tackle heavy-duty pirating for profit (think mafia / yakuza) to individuals. Those penalties were designed to be severe enough to put a criminal organization on the rocks.
There are only a few legitimate uses of music sharing:
- getting digital copies of music that you already own
- sampling new music
Well now you see it's like this...
First we had narrow band, then broadband, then we'll see wideband, and really wideband, and ultrawideband, and doubleplusultrawideband...
I'll agree with you and go you a bit farther...
You should be required to take your driver's test every 5 years. Fail the test, be forced to take 5 hours of remedial class and come back before 30 days are up.
Testing should probably include some objective measures of physical/cognitive ability. Reaction time, eyesight, hearing.
Post age 70, testing should probably be done every 2-3 years.
Sounds like one of the concepts that David Brin uses in his Uplift series books.
In Sundiver, there's a mention that the gov't has to use up an "allowance" in order to hush up an affair. Meaning that the gov't is only allowed to keep a certain number of things secret at any time.
In Earth, everyone spies on everyone else. Elderly folks have taken up the hobby of watching others and the government. The gov't is not allowed to have secrets (nobody is).
There is a middle road...
Add metadata to the system that allows a destination SMTP server to determine wether a piece of inbound e-mail is authenticated, anonymous or forged.
Right now, a destination SMTP server has no (reliable) way to tell whether the FROM: domain is forged, the entire FROM: address is forged.
A first step would be to give domain admins the control over which hosts are allowed to send e-mail out on behalf of their domain. (Eliminate joe jobs.) This is what the reverse MX proposals attempt to do (DMP, DRIP, SMTP+SPF, RMX). It answers (2) basic questions: Has the domain admin locked their domain down to a limited number of hosts that are allowed to send e-mail on behalf of that domain. Is the host that is currently trying to talk to my mail server on that list? Poorly administered domains will have loose/missing RMX information, and your server may choose to delay/reject/question e-mail from a domain like that. (Nice part is that reverse-MX is opt-in and puts control in the hands of the local admins.) You can still be anonymous under this system.
Second step is authenticated sender stuff. Where you have to present credentials to the outbound SMTP server and your e-mail gets signed with your credentials. Implementation costs are a good bit higher and you get into the issue of key security, biometrics, etc... That's not to say that it's impossible to be anonymous under this system, there will still be domains that don't authenticate their senders.
A big problem in today's spam fight is that real spam is forged 6 ways from Sunday. If we can at least tell that e-mail is forged, it makes it easier to fight.
For that amount of data being bandied around, I'm pretty sure you'd want to go with Gigabit Ethernet instead of 100Mbps Ethernet. Cheapest GigE switches that I can think of right now are around $2k each, and the better (large frame support) GigE NICs are $300 each.
Realistic costs per gigabyte of secondary level storage are still up in the $2-$3 range. Which is more like $2-$3 million for a petabyte of secondary storage.
Primary storage costs are up around $10-$15 per gigabyte (not including backup costs).
1 order of magnitude if it's software that you're writing to run on your own system...
... rinse repeat.
2 orders of magnitude if you're trying to write software that will run on multiple systems.
3 orders of magnitude if you're trying to write software to run on other people's systems (i.e. customers).
Do I program for KDE, or X, or somethingelse? What libraries am I depending on? Can I count on them being there? Do I have to distribut them?
Bah... get the (8) drive external case from Promise. Put (8) IDE drives in and hook it to a SCSI card in your system.
Without hot spare, you'll probably see 2Tb.
Promise does make a (6) port ATA/100 raid card. Biggest problem is that unless you go with a $500 server case (like the wide/fat Dell Poweredge 4300 style), the IDE cables have a tough time reaching the upper drive bays in the case.
Their (6) port SATA raid card makes that more of a moot point since SATA cables are (IIRC) 1m in length instead of a measly 18".
Price for a 120Gb external USB drive is somewhere around $180.
The AIT2 tapes that we buy hold something like 50/130Gb for $60/tape. Tape drive cost $900 or so.
Advantage of tapes is that they're small, they fit in a fire safe, it's easy to take them off-site. But they're a bear to work with if you only need to pull a few files back off the tape.
We now run a 2-tier backup system... The AIT2 backs up every night and goes in the fire safe. A second backup ends up on a external USB drive. We've considered getting (3) drives and doing a weekly shuffle (live goes off-site, off-site comes back and sits off-line, oldest drive gets put back online).
For the home user / small office... external USB/firewire drives are a very reasonable method of backup.
Get a $10-$20 therm with a sensor lead and check out the temperatures that you're running your hard drives at. Interior case temp should be between 35C and 40C (maybe as high as 45C...).
$20 worth of cooling fan works wonders... my preferred cooling fan for hard drives is one that takes up (2) 5.25" bays, has a single 60mm fan and holds (3) 3.5" HDs. (Although it's best if you only put (2) HDs in there so that there's a good air gap.)
If you're putting HDs inside of external USB drive cases - don't put 7200rpm drives in cases that don't have active cooling. I try to stick with 5400rpm drives for secondary storage (like USB/firewire attached devices) because they run cooler.
Basically, heat will kill a drive faster then dropping it.
Agreed... especially since their site isn't a store where you'd like to keep track of a visitor's session in-memory.
(The other nit that bugs me is when news sites change the URL on their stories after it falls off the front page.)
Which begs the question... what was the author of the ninja web site smoking / imbibing when they created that web page?
Was it on a dare, or was it a reaction to the hamster dance (mammal!)?
I know this is more of a AskSlashdot question...
My impression of Linux/Unix systems has always been that each host has it's own set of user accounts and if I have 3 hosts it means that I have to maintain 3 sets of passwords. With NT4/Win2000, my servers share a common userspace so that you only have to maintain a single user account. Is there something under Linux/Unix that does this?
How easy is it to drop a Samba server into an existing Win2000 network? Our Novell 5 server is starting to show it's age (file/printing only) and I'm starting to wonder whether to move to a later version of Novell, switch to Linux/Samba, use a NAS device, or just load up another Win2000 server.
(With the security issues this year with Windows, however, I'm not sure I want to make Windows our main file server.)
I know a developer who did the same sort of thing in an initialization routine for a program he was writing for a customer. The first draft of the software that he showed them took around a minute to initialize all of the data tables /etc.
When he was done writing the application, he removed the delay loop from the code and the system now initialized within 15-20 seconds.
His reasoning was that it gave the customer something concrete to complain about during development... hopefully reducing the number of other absurd change requests.
Me? I just shook my head...
I can't see it being that black-n-white.
A few months ago, I picked up Medal of Honor: Allied Assault because I was in the market for a FPS and had heard decent things about it.
Loading up the Normandy Beach assult scenario... I'm not sure that I would've been able to face something like that in real life. While merely a game... perhaps not that realistic... it still enables me to mentally step into the boots of a grunt for a little bit and reflect on just how nasty a business it was.
I also switched to Mozilla when 1.4 came out (think I saw the announcement here on /.). Once Thunderbird and Firebird get a bit more mature I'll make the jump again. A lot of the users at work are still using old versions of Netscape 4.x for browsing/e-mail -- we'll be upgrading them as well.
Took me a week or two to get comfortable... change some things around (I like tabs to open up in the background for instance). Now I'm hooked on tabbed browsing and can't imagine going back to IE's individual windows.
Biggest complaint that I have at the moment is that right-clicking on a tab, it's too easy to hit the "close all other tabs" choice... and I don't know if there's a way to get a confirmation. Been trying to train my fingers to use Ctrl-W instead.
Or do the smart thing and sign up for a throw-away e-mail account somewhere (I think I used Hotmail... or something).
You only need the e-mail account to be valid long enough to reply to the confirmation e-mail.
Same concept as DRIP, DMP and RMX... only difference is that SMTP+SPF folks are late to the game at even *starting* to write an IETF draft. (Some of the other proposals are on their 3rd or 4th drafts already.)
Any reverse MX system needs to answer 2 questions:
1. Does the source domain have a reverse MX listing/policy?
2. Is the IP of the server that's attempting to send me e-mail on behalf of a domain listed in that reverse MX entry?
Reverse MX is not a weak try, it's a very simple system that closes *one* of the loopholes, raising the barrier a bit.
The biggest impact will be on joe-jobs and e-mail worms that attempt to bypass properly administered mail servers.
Your e-mail provider will either make it possible for you to send mail or lose your business to someone who will...
Or, if you own the domain, set your reverse MX records to allow you to send e-mail from any IP address. (However, loosely defined IP ranges have a high chance that the destination mail server will score you more towards a spam domain then a ham domain.)
Yours is an easy solution... if you want to run your own mail server, then register a domain and configure your reverse MX records as needed.
Hosting services will follow the money trail... which means that if a customer needs an outbound SMTP server, they'll provide one or lose the business.
Agreed... work e-mail should be routed through your company's mail server. Either by authenticated/encrypted SMTP or by using a VPN tunnel to connect into your company's network.
(The latter situation is the one we use... because employees already have to get access to files and intranet web applications if they want to get work done.)