I've read that RAID 3/4/5 is unreliable. As capacities grow, it takes longer to reconstruct a new spare from the surviving drives when one dies. In fact, BAARF contends that capacities have grown to the point that it's likely that another drive will fail during reconstruction. Are there any big drawbacks to RAID 6?
RAID6 is a far better option then RAID5. At least it makes it less likely that you'll end up with a double-drive failure that takes out the entire array.
OTOH, the failure mode of both RAID5 and RAID6 leaves a lot to be desired. Rebuild time increases linearly as you add more disks to the array. So a 10+ RAID5/RAID6 array can have huge rebuild times, leaving you vulnerable for a lot longer. As in half a day or longer to rebuild the array (or at least a few hours).
Personally, my preference is the more conservative RAID10 approach. Rebuild times are based on the size of an individual disk in the array (not the total array size), which means your vulnerability window is a lot smaller. And depending on luck, you can survive a multi-disk failure. Rebuild times are typically under 2 hours for arrays that are based on 300-500GB drives.
(My preference is to have 1 spare disk for every 6-8 drives in the array. So a 12 disk RAID10 array would probably be RAID10 over 10 disks with the other two as spares.)
Yes. The Russian mafia. They have much more than sufficient resource - not merely access to supercomputers, but also access to large botnets of other people's PCs. Cracking encryption is a task well suited to distributed computing.
Yes, these people can and routinely do crack military grade encryption, if the data is valuable enough. This data is valuable enough.
Highly unlikely.
What they (the attackers) are probably doing is either:
1) Man in the Middle (MITM) attack where the source/destination players (Alice & BoB) don't properly authenticate their encryption keys. Which lets them read all of the traffic by pretending to be the other end of the stream to each player.
2) Attacking the weak point of any encryption system - key management. Either by keylogging to obtain the passphrase, or other rootkit / cracking work to steal the private keys. Which then allows them to decrypt the messages. Getting key management correct is HARD (the devil is in the details).
3) Suborning either Alice or Bob (i.e. bribery or social engineering). Or simply via the lead lined rubber hose attack.
There's an awful lot of very very smart people out there who are looking at the current algorithms in use (AES, RSA, etc). If there were known weaknesses in the algorithms, we would have heard about them. Something that is encrypted with today's 256bit symmetric encryption algorithms is extremely secure for the foreseeable future (40+ years?). At least, as long as the encryption key is not leaked through some other fashion.
The poster didn't want SQL, so I'm guessing they ruled out SQLite on those grounds.
They may not want SQL (or think that SQL isn't what they want), but it's not like SQL is overkill when packaged in something like SQLite. Create the table and read/write to it. Go ahead and treat it like a flat file. The overhead is absolutely minimal in embedded SQL systems like SQLite.
(Plus it gets your feet wet with SQL, which carries forward to all sorts of other future projects.)
It's in Blizzard's interest to have everyone max geared in BC gear before Lich King is released.
Mmmm, last I heard (rumors only), Blizzard stated that folks in Black Temple gear or beyond will probably be okay with gear through half the expansion. That would indicate (to me) that the gear levels will be similar to what happened at L60 when Burning Crusade came out.
Basically, I fully expect that all of that fancy blue gear from Burning Crusades will probably be made obsolete by quest greens in the new expansion's starting zones. Purple quality gear might last you until low-70s.
So as much as I want to get 75 or 100 badges of justice for those nice pieces of gear, I won't cry if I don't manage it before WotLK comes out.
AoC is coming out way way too early. It just isn't ready. What Blizzard did that was more important than being friendly to all players was to raise the bar in perceived quality. They may have actually raised it too high as most gamers no longer tolerate buggy and unbalanced software that we used to accept for granted. WOW presents a polish. Yeah it covers some major dings underneath but the overall effect is that looking at it most players never encounter anything game breaking.
^^ This
The first two weeks that I started to play WoW, I constantly found myself admiring the amount of polish that went into the starting areas and class designs. Yeah, there were some design decisions that I didn't agree with, but Blizzard gets it about 95% right. Lots of moments where I said, "oh, that's a nice touch". Getting started in WoW is extremely easy. You get gear upgrades at a steady pace from quests or drops. There's a good bit of variety in how the classes work. It's very casual-friendly, which is where the big money is.
EQ never got much above 70-80% "right" (given the sheer number of nerfs, reversals of decisions, over-boosting then over-nerfing then taking 3 more patches to find the balance point).
EQ2 was close, but they still only got to the 85-90% mark.
And even then, there may be cheaper solutions to this particular problem, such as signing pages instead of encrypting the whole lot.
I suspect, that while signing might work for static pages where the signing values can be cached - you won't gain any CPU time from merely signing instead of both signing and encrypting.
(That's a guess... my crypto books are buried in boxes at the moment.)
AFAIK, it doesn't provide a way to throttle connections (if it does, please share).
We don't use it ourselves - and we use Shorewall to manage our firewall settings, but I refer you to Shorewall Rules. There is a section there titled "rate limit". It allows you to control how many connections per second/minute and how big of a burst are allowed before Shorewall will block it. AFAIK, this is done with iptables.
Re:Just a tad over the top? No ECC = NO buy
on
DDR3 RAM Explained
·
· Score: 1
I run memtest for a minimum of 48 hours on any new system I build and have never had any problem with RAM that has passed that. This is the best I can do without the premium of paying for ECC capable motherboards and RAM.
Memtest86 (and Memtest86+) do not do a good job of finding RAM that is borderline working. They are only able to find RAM that is definitely not working. By "borderline", I'm talking about systems that fail under moderate to heavy load in random fashion (usually bluescreens or random application crashes). Or instances where things like QuickPar will fail to create or verify PAR2 sets.
By far, the best way that I've found over the years to truly stress test a system and verify that it will work correctly is a combination of Prime95 in torture-test mode and running some sort of heavy disk activity test. Prime95 exercises *both* the CPU and RAM at the same time, which is an excellent way of uncovering timing issues (i.e. CAS 2.5 RAM sold as CAS 2.0).
If your system can survive Prime95 + running the disks non-stop + running the video-card non-stop for 72 hours, then you are mostly home free.
The best would be if SELinux could allow for a "learning" mode for a single application in addition to the modes it has.
Read up on "seaudit" and creating custom profiles.
(I still think the process could be a bit more human-friendly, but the tools do exist.) For example - a mail program may do a limited number of connections to port 25 per second, which is a normal situation, but if a higher frequency occurs that means that there may be a problem that has to be checked. OK - It's not easy to be intelligent about things like this, but system behavior pattern is a critical point in security too.
Things like that are better handled in IPTABLES, or in the application itself. Those do not fall under the purview of SELinux which is about controlling access to the resource (not rate limiting or rationing out a resource).
Agreed, I have SELinux fully on with F8, I do notice a few messages from time to time, which I usually correct following the instruction given by SETroubleshoot, and all is well so far.
I've wanted to use it since 2004 or so (back when I was running Gentoo), but while the core functionality was there, I wasn't up to the task of dealing with it.
When we started switching boxes over to CentOS 5 (back in 2007), it came with SELinux enabled out-of-the-box in "targeted" mode. To me, that was the tipping point for SELinux adoption. It now had a major company (Red Hat) who was shipping it as enabled and was supporting it in a major fashion.
It still gets in my way sometimes. I had to write a custom profile to get Nagios 2.x working. And I'll be spending some time this morning convincing Twiki to run from the/var/www/twiki folder. Or maybe I'll move the install folder to somewhere more SELinux friendly. Or fix the file labeling.
But on the whole - I'm a firm believer in the concept. It provides defense in depth, so even if Apache gets hacked there are limits to what an attacker can do without also defeating SELinux.
(And given the number of sealert messages that I get when SELinux isn't configured properly, it apparently works well.)
I want to know if the audio going to be historically accurate, or will they "jazz" up the sounds to make the Saturn V sound like a Die Hard movie? I have an old laserdisk of an IMAX shuttle movie, and was just blown away by the sound of the engines at launch. Nothing produced by Hollywood comes close.
*sighs* I was just watching something or another on (I think) NatGeo's HD channel last week. It was footage of the Challenger disaster and they had ADDED a white flash (i.e. the area where the explosion started was now a circular flash of white). The way it was done made it obvious that it wasn't part of the original footage, but some fool of a producer probably thought it needed spicing up.
No clue what program it was. But I was extremely disappointed in NatGeo.
Meh, that's no longer a good excuse. The modern codecs are efficient enough that you can easily show 640x360 sized clips without busting the bandwidth.
Vista also released a huge security vulnerability into the wild that can never be taken back. Insert a Vista install DVD into a computer and boot into it. With the recovery console you can have full access to a system's hard drive without administrator password now.
No it didn't.
1) If the attacker has physical access to the machine, the game is already up.
2) There were already a dozen other methods to get access to the contents of a NTFS formatted drive.
(The only objection that might have merit would be if the DVD allows you access to EFS encrypted files without having to supply the user's password. But then, EFS was never that secure in the first place. And besides, since the attacker has physical access to the machine - the game is already lost, barring encrypted partitions like TrueCrypt or PGPDisk.)
I used both Win2K and WinXP. WiFi support for my laptops on Win2K was a hodge-podge of poorly written vendor-specific tools. Having that integrated in WinXP was a very nice upgrade.
(Other then that, moving from Win2K to WinXP was a non-event other then the activation nonsense. It also helped that WinXP played well with games a bit better then Win2K.)
a) That's $276 that can't go towards other improvements in the business, or that we could use to pay employees a bit more salary. And that $276 buys you zilch in terms of support, while with open-source I could probably get a decent support contract for $100/desktop per year. If I'm going to spend money, it better be to make our jobs easier.
b) We have to deal with tracking the licenses. Which is a damn PITA. Or else we have to install some sort of license server from Microsoft (more $$$ for the hardware and OS). I hate tracking licenses for commercial software.
c) We have to deal with Vista's opinions about tracking whether it is licensed or not. A ticking bomb waiting to go off resulting in support headaches.
... management system right now. One problem is, Subversion won't work because I need to have totally clean checkout trees. Subversion inserts tracking files in the checkout trees. So I guess I have to look for something else.
If you're trying to do something like track configuration changes to a Linux server (such as monitoring/etc), try FSVS which is a different front-end. It stores its data in a SVN repository, allowing you to use the regular SVN tools. There are some other bells and whistles with FSVS, but I mostly use it to keep track of changes that I made to a server.
1. Make changes to/etc/somefile
2. Go back to "/"
3. fsvs ci -m "I made the following changes..."/etc/somefile
If I'm ever curious about what a particular change involved, I connect to the SVN repository using a tool like TortoiseSVN and use TSVN's diff tool to look. (Since I use TSVN a lot, I'm most familiar with its diff tool.)
FSVS doesn't create ".svn" folders everywhere. It keeps its information in a central folder (/etc/fsvs - I think is the current location).
Or, to stay in the legal realm, iTunes TODAY sends their HD movies out at 4Mbps... and they really look bad. X-Box sends them out at 6Mbps... and they are better but still pretty bad. Over-the-air HD is 19Mbps, though it has the old MPEG2 compression and none of the new goodness. 10Mbps is probably good enough for most people, but bear in mind that Blu-Ray is 40Mbps, and is capable of using the much newer, more efficient codecs.
A lot of it depends on the video source. For 720p, that is clean, not a lot of background movement, and is mostly talking heads... you can push a MPEG4 codec down to a bit under 2Mbps and not see issues. Maybe even down to 1.25Mbps.
For busier footage (such as FRAPS caps of action games - WoW, Oblivion, FEAR, etc) or for grainy footage, you'll need a MPEG4 bitrate in the 3-4Mbps range to avoid blockiness. The farther you go below 3Mbps with 720p, the more likely that a fast camera pan will show distortion and artifacts. I went with 3Mbps as my "standard" because it gave me very good results 99% of the time.
I wish they had waited a year or two longer before settling on MPEG2. They could have gone with MPEG4 at 5Mbps, resulting in a crisp and clear 1080i/720p picture without using up all that bandwidth that MPEG2 eats up.
Seriously, if you are using MORE than 1GB a day, you are a heavy user. And you, are definitely a heavy user considering you have some sort of servers running (bittorrent?). After all, there is no way you can rack up tx>rx unless you are running something like that.
That was probably true 5-10 years ago. But now that video clip (Youtube, Google, Joost) sites are popular on the web with regular users, it's definitely no longer true. Plus Netflix, Apple TV, downloading patches, etc. Or uploading photos to photo sharing sites. It all adds up real quick when you're connecting to the net for hours at a time.
A heavy user today is more likely to be over 5GB per day. A medium user who likes lots of video uses 1-2GB per day.
I hate books for programming. Give me electronic. The main reason is electronic text search. With a book I have to flip through the pages, look through the contents, or manually search through the index to find the topic. Bookmarks get less effective as you add more and more bookmarks to the book. But now full text search and search engines... no more flipping through pages. Find me "BufferedString". Bam. I'm there.
Actually, I find that to be a blessing with paper books (and I generally prefer paper for technical books, even though I own a Sony eReader). Reference works like the old command/function lists, showing parameters, are probably an exception (I prefer those to be integrated into the IDE, or I'll look them up on a 2nd screen).
One thing that I learned 10-15 years ago... don't put blinders on when searching for information. As you search, spend 10-20% of your time looking at results that aren't exactly what you were looking for. Anything that catches your eye, that is the least bit connected, or that may shed light on another issue. You don't have to read the extraneous information in-depth, but you should at least file the concepts away in the back of your mind.
Which pays itself back in spades down the road when you, even vaguely, remember what the possible solution for a new problem is. You'll be able to better form a search query to pull up that information you saw a few months earlier. Which is a lot better then doing another blind search with not a lot of idea about what you're looking for.
I work with a bunch of technical folks. The most frustrating (and self-limiting) folks are those who simply want "the answer" to their current problem. They never grasp the concept that by trying to learn in small spurts, their work will become easier down the road. Instead, they say "I'll learn the details later, just help me fix this", and thus never get anywhere.
(Which isn't really germane to the topic at hand... except that when flipping through a paper technical reference manual, it's a lot easier to glance at content other then what you are specifically looking for. Giving me an opportunity to learn a bit about something else while I'm trying to look up something specific.)
Wait a few more years (5-10 at a guess) and the prices will probably get down to $50. Just like laptops used to cost $1500 and are now down in the $300-$500 range.
The Sony isn't a bad deal at $280 (my pain point was $300). I'd have liked it less expensive, but it was finally down to a price that I could deal with.
(And the only books that I bought so far are from Baen's site, which is a no-DRM format. Everything else was free downloads from Project Gutenberg. Since I've read about a dozen PG books so far... I've gotten my money's worth in only a few short months.)
I Have not changed my mind. I may use one, but I will always prefer to read a "dead tree" book. I love building my library of books. Some I even read again once in a while.
Eh... I have a huge paper library as well. After 20 years and 4 moves, I'm no longer as fond of lugging all that paper around. I figure it cost me around $800 during my last move to move all those books.
(All the e-books that I have so far are zero-DRM. Which means that I can easily back them up, just like any other electronic files that I want to keep for decades.)
Slashdot Mirror
(doh... which of course is make by SanDisk, not Corsair.)
And they've finally released the 8GB Cruzer Titanium... so now I'm tempted to upgrade.
Still doesn't change the fact that those little Cruzer Titanium's can take a hell of a beating. Nice size, nice weight.
4GB flash drives (of any size) are OLD. The current "big" sizes are 8GB.
What I want is a Corsair Cruzer Titanium in a 16GB or 32GB size.
(I like my little 2GB Cruzer Titanium. It hangs off my keychain and is surviving very well on a day-to-day basis.)
I've read that RAID 3/4/5 is unreliable. As capacities grow, it takes longer to reconstruct a new spare from the surviving drives when one dies. In fact, BAARF contends that capacities have grown to the point that it's likely that another drive will fail during reconstruction. Are there any big drawbacks to RAID 6?
RAID6 is a far better option then RAID5. At least it makes it less likely that you'll end up with a double-drive failure that takes out the entire array.
OTOH, the failure mode of both RAID5 and RAID6 leaves a lot to be desired. Rebuild time increases linearly as you add more disks to the array. So a 10+ RAID5/RAID6 array can have huge rebuild times, leaving you vulnerable for a lot longer. As in half a day or longer to rebuild the array (or at least a few hours).
Personally, my preference is the more conservative RAID10 approach. Rebuild times are based on the size of an individual disk in the array (not the total array size), which means your vulnerability window is a lot smaller. And depending on luck, you can survive a multi-disk failure. Rebuild times are typically under 2 hours for arrays that are based on 300-500GB drives.
(My preference is to have 1 spare disk for every 6-8 drives in the array. So a 12 disk RAID10 array would probably be RAID10 over 10 disks with the other two as spares.)
Yes. The Russian mafia. They have much more than sufficient resource - not merely access to supercomputers, but also access to large botnets of other people's PCs. Cracking encryption is a task well suited to distributed computing.
Yes, these people can and routinely do crack military grade encryption, if the data is valuable enough. This data is valuable enough.
Highly unlikely.
What they (the attackers) are probably doing is either:
1) Man in the Middle (MITM) attack where the source/destination players (Alice & BoB) don't properly authenticate their encryption keys. Which lets them read all of the traffic by pretending to be the other end of the stream to each player.
2) Attacking the weak point of any encryption system - key management. Either by keylogging to obtain the passphrase, or other rootkit / cracking work to steal the private keys. Which then allows them to decrypt the messages. Getting key management correct is HARD (the devil is in the details).
3) Suborning either Alice or Bob (i.e. bribery or social engineering). Or simply via the lead lined rubber hose attack.
There's an awful lot of very very smart people out there who are looking at the current algorithms in use (AES, RSA, etc). If there were known weaknesses in the algorithms, we would have heard about them. Something that is encrypted with today's 256bit symmetric encryption algorithms is extremely secure for the foreseeable future (40+ years?). At least, as long as the encryption key is not leaked through some other fashion.
The poster didn't want SQL, so I'm guessing they ruled out SQLite on those grounds.
They may not want SQL (or think that SQL isn't what they want), but it's not like SQL is overkill when packaged in something like SQLite. Create the table and read/write to it. Go ahead and treat it like a flat file. The overhead is absolutely minimal in embedded SQL systems like SQLite.
(Plus it gets your feet wet with SQL, which carries forward to all sorts of other future projects.)
It's in Blizzard's interest to have everyone max geared in BC gear before Lich King is released.
Mmmm, last I heard (rumors only), Blizzard stated that folks in Black Temple gear or beyond will probably be okay with gear through half the expansion. That would indicate (to me) that the gear levels will be similar to what happened at L60 when Burning Crusade came out.
Basically, I fully expect that all of that fancy blue gear from Burning Crusades will probably be made obsolete by quest greens in the new expansion's starting zones. Purple quality gear might last you until low-70s.
So as much as I want to get 75 or 100 badges of justice for those nice pieces of gear, I won't cry if I don't manage it before WotLK comes out.
Probably one of the easiest places to get info about the upcoming expansion is WoWWiki's Wrath of the Lich King page.
Since I'm not in the alpha testing, I can't comment to the veracity of what is on WoWWiki's site, but the editors over there seem to be fairly good.
AoC is coming out way way too early. It just isn't ready. What Blizzard did that was more important than being friendly to all players was to raise the bar in perceived quality. They may have actually raised it too high as most gamers no longer tolerate buggy and unbalanced software that we used to accept for granted. WOW presents a polish. Yeah it covers some major dings underneath but the overall effect is that looking at it most players never encounter anything game breaking.
^^ This
The first two weeks that I started to play WoW, I constantly found myself admiring the amount of polish that went into the starting areas and class designs. Yeah, there were some design decisions that I didn't agree with, but Blizzard gets it about 95% right. Lots of moments where I said, "oh, that's a nice touch". Getting started in WoW is extremely easy. You get gear upgrades at a steady pace from quests or drops. There's a good bit of variety in how the classes work. It's very casual-friendly, which is where the big money is.
EQ never got much above 70-80% "right" (given the sheer number of nerfs, reversals of decisions, over-boosting then over-nerfing then taking 3 more patches to find the balance point).
EQ2 was close, but they still only got to the 85-90% mark.
And even then, there may be cheaper solutions to this particular problem, such as signing pages instead of encrypting the whole lot.
I suspect, that while signing might work for static pages where the signing values can be cached - you won't gain any CPU time from merely signing instead of both signing and encrypting.
(That's a guess... my crypto books are buried in boxes at the moment.)
AFAIK, it doesn't provide a way to throttle connections (if it does, please share).
We don't use it ourselves - and we use Shorewall to manage our firewall settings, but I refer you to Shorewall Rules. There is a section there titled "rate limit". It allows you to control how many connections per second/minute and how big of a burst are allowed before Shorewall will block it. AFAIK, this is done with iptables.
Or this older article from 2005 Using iptables to rate-limit incoming connections.
I run memtest for a minimum of 48 hours on any new system I build and have never had any problem with RAM that has passed that. This is the best I can do without the premium of paying for ECC capable motherboards and RAM.
Memtest86 (and Memtest86+) do not do a good job of finding RAM that is borderline working. They are only able to find RAM that is definitely not working. By "borderline", I'm talking about systems that fail under moderate to heavy load in random fashion (usually bluescreens or random application crashes). Or instances where things like QuickPar will fail to create or verify PAR2 sets.
By far, the best way that I've found over the years to truly stress test a system and verify that it will work correctly is a combination of Prime95 in torture-test mode and running some sort of heavy disk activity test. Prime95 exercises *both* the CPU and RAM at the same time, which is an excellent way of uncovering timing issues (i.e. CAS 2.5 RAM sold as CAS 2.0).
If your system can survive Prime95 + running the disks non-stop + running the video-card non-stop for 72 hours, then you are mostly home free.
The best would be if SELinux could allow for a "learning" mode for a single application in addition to the modes it has.
Read up on "seaudit" and creating custom profiles.
(I still think the process could be a bit more human-friendly, but the tools do exist.)
For example - a mail program may do a limited number of connections to port 25 per second, which is a normal situation, but if a higher frequency occurs that means that there may be a problem that has to be checked. OK - It's not easy to be intelligent about things like this, but system behavior pattern is a critical point in security too.
Things like that are better handled in IPTABLES, or in the application itself. Those do not fall under the purview of SELinux which is about controlling access to the resource (not rate limiting or rationing out a resource).
Agreed, I have SELinux fully on with F8, I do notice a few messages from time to time, which I usually correct following the instruction given by SETroubleshoot, and all is well so far.
/var/www/twiki folder. Or maybe I'll move the install folder to somewhere more SELinux friendly. Or fix the file labeling.
I've wanted to use it since 2004 or so (back when I was running Gentoo), but while the core functionality was there, I wasn't up to the task of dealing with it.
When we started switching boxes over to CentOS 5 (back in 2007), it came with SELinux enabled out-of-the-box in "targeted" mode. To me, that was the tipping point for SELinux adoption. It now had a major company (Red Hat) who was shipping it as enabled and was supporting it in a major fashion.
It still gets in my way sometimes. I had to write a custom profile to get Nagios 2.x working. And I'll be spending some time this morning convincing Twiki to run from the
But on the whole - I'm a firm believer in the concept. It provides defense in depth, so even if Apache gets hacked there are limits to what an attacker can do without also defeating SELinux.
(And given the number of sealert messages that I get when SELinux isn't configured properly, it apparently works well.)
*golf clap* I really don't miss working with JCL (which I did back in the early-mid 90s).
/. posting system without it complaining about caps.)
(I'm more amazed that you managed to slip all that code past the
I want to know if the audio going to be historically accurate, or will they "jazz" up the sounds to make the Saturn V sound like a Die Hard movie? I have an old laserdisk of an IMAX shuttle movie, and was just blown away by the sound of the engines at launch. Nothing produced by Hollywood comes close.
*sighs* I was just watching something or another on (I think) NatGeo's HD channel last week. It was footage of the Challenger disaster and they had ADDED a white flash (i.e. the area where the explosion started was now a circular flash of white). The way it was done made it obvious that it wasn't part of the original footage, but some fool of a producer probably thought it needed spicing up.
No clue what program it was. But I was extremely disappointed in NatGeo.
Uh, network bandwidth?
Meh, that's no longer a good excuse. The modern codecs are efficient enough that you can easily show 640x360 sized clips without busting the bandwidth.
Vista also released a huge security vulnerability into the wild that can never be taken back. Insert a Vista install DVD into a computer and boot into it. With the recovery console you can have full access to a system's hard drive without administrator password now.
No it didn't.
1) If the attacker has physical access to the machine, the game is already up.
2) There were already a dozen other methods to get access to the contents of a NTFS formatted drive.
(The only objection that might have merit would be if the DVD allows you access to EFS encrypted files without having to supply the user's password. But then, EFS was never that secure in the first place. And besides, since the attacker has physical access to the machine - the game is already lost, barring encrypted partitions like TrueCrypt or PGPDisk.)
I really prefer 2000 over XP even now.
I used both Win2K and WinXP. WiFi support for my laptops on Win2K was a hodge-podge of poorly written vendor-specific tools. Having that integrated in WinXP was a very nice upgrade.
(Other then that, moving from Win2K to WinXP was a non-event other then the activation nonsense. It also helped that WinXP played well with games a bit better then Win2K.)
Except that:
a) That's $276 that can't go towards other improvements in the business, or that we could use to pay employees a bit more salary. And that $276 buys you zilch in terms of support, while with open-source I could probably get a decent support contract for $100/desktop per year. If I'm going to spend money, it better be to make our jobs easier.
b) We have to deal with tracking the licenses. Which is a damn PITA. Or else we have to install some sort of license server from Microsoft (more $$$ for the hardware and OS). I hate tracking licenses for commercial software.
c) We have to deal with Vista's opinions about tracking whether it is licensed or not. A ticking bomb waiting to go off resulting in support headaches.
... management system right now. One problem is, Subversion won't work because I need to have totally clean checkout trees. Subversion inserts tracking files in the checkout trees. So I guess I have to look for something else.
/etc), try FSVS which is a different front-end. It stores its data in a SVN repository, allowing you to use the regular SVN tools. There are some other bells and whistles with FSVS, but I mostly use it to keep track of changes that I made to a server.
/etc/somefile /etc/somefile
If you're trying to do something like track configuration changes to a Linux server (such as monitoring
1. Make changes to
2. Go back to "/"
3. fsvs ci -m "I made the following changes..."
If I'm ever curious about what a particular change involved, I connect to the SVN repository using a tool like TortoiseSVN and use TSVN's diff tool to look. (Since I use TSVN a lot, I'm most familiar with its diff tool.)
FSVS doesn't create ".svn" folders everywhere. It keeps its information in a central folder (/etc/fsvs - I think is the current location).
Or, to stay in the legal realm, iTunes TODAY sends their HD movies out at 4Mbps... and they really look bad. X-Box sends them out at 6Mbps... and they are better but still pretty bad. Over-the-air HD is 19Mbps, though it has the old MPEG2 compression and none of the new goodness. 10Mbps is probably good enough for most people, but bear in mind that Blu-Ray is 40Mbps, and is capable of using the much newer, more efficient codecs.
A lot of it depends on the video source. For 720p, that is clean, not a lot of background movement, and is mostly talking heads... you can push a MPEG4 codec down to a bit under 2Mbps and not see issues. Maybe even down to 1.25Mbps.
For busier footage (such as FRAPS caps of action games - WoW, Oblivion, FEAR, etc) or for grainy footage, you'll need a MPEG4 bitrate in the 3-4Mbps range to avoid blockiness. The farther you go below 3Mbps with 720p, the more likely that a fast camera pan will show distortion and artifacts. I went with 3Mbps as my "standard" because it gave me very good results 99% of the time.
I wish they had waited a year or two longer before settling on MPEG2. They could have gone with MPEG4 at 5Mbps, resulting in a crisp and clear 1080i/720p picture without using up all that bandwidth that MPEG2 eats up.
Seriously, if you are using MORE than 1GB a day, you are a heavy user. And you, are definitely a heavy user considering you have some sort of servers running (bittorrent?). After all, there is no way you can rack up tx>rx unless you are running something like that.
That was probably true 5-10 years ago. But now that video clip (Youtube, Google, Joost) sites are popular on the web with regular users, it's definitely no longer true. Plus Netflix, Apple TV, downloading patches, etc. Or uploading photos to photo sharing sites. It all adds up real quick when you're connecting to the net for hours at a time.
A heavy user today is more likely to be over 5GB per day. A medium user who likes lots of video uses 1-2GB per day.
I hate books for programming. Give me electronic. The main reason is electronic text search. With a book I have to flip through the pages, look through the contents, or manually search through the index to find the topic. Bookmarks get less effective as you add more and more bookmarks to the book. But now full text search and search engines... no more flipping through pages. Find me "BufferedString". Bam. I'm there.
Actually, I find that to be a blessing with paper books (and I generally prefer paper for technical books, even though I own a Sony eReader). Reference works like the old command/function lists, showing parameters, are probably an exception (I prefer those to be integrated into the IDE, or I'll look them up on a 2nd screen).
One thing that I learned 10-15 years ago... don't put blinders on when searching for information. As you search, spend 10-20% of your time looking at results that aren't exactly what you were looking for. Anything that catches your eye, that is the least bit connected, or that may shed light on another issue. You don't have to read the extraneous information in-depth, but you should at least file the concepts away in the back of your mind.
Which pays itself back in spades down the road when you, even vaguely, remember what the possible solution for a new problem is. You'll be able to better form a search query to pull up that information you saw a few months earlier. Which is a lot better then doing another blind search with not a lot of idea about what you're looking for.
I work with a bunch of technical folks. The most frustrating (and self-limiting) folks are those who simply want "the answer" to their current problem. They never grasp the concept that by trying to learn in small spurts, their work will become easier down the road. Instead, they say "I'll learn the details later, just help me fix this", and thus never get anywhere.
(Which isn't really germane to the topic at hand... except that when flipping through a paper technical reference manual, it's a lot easier to glance at content other then what you are specifically looking for. Giving me an opportunity to learn a bit about something else while I'm trying to look up something specific.)
Wait a few more years (5-10 at a guess) and the prices will probably get down to $50. Just like laptops used to cost $1500 and are now down in the $300-$500 range.
The Sony isn't a bad deal at $280 (my pain point was $300). I'd have liked it less expensive, but it was finally down to a price that I could deal with.
(And the only books that I bought so far are from Baen's site, which is a no-DRM format. Everything else was free downloads from Project Gutenberg. Since I've read about a dozen PG books so far... I've gotten my money's worth in only a few short months.)
I Have not changed my mind. I may use one, but I will always prefer to read a "dead tree" book. I love building my library of books. Some I even read again once in a while.
Eh... I have a huge paper library as well. After 20 years and 4 moves, I'm no longer as fond of lugging all that paper around. I figure it cost me around $800 during my last move to move all those books.
(All the e-books that I have so far are zero-DRM. Which means that I can easily back them up, just like any other electronic files that I want to keep for decades.)