Here's what creators of ZFS have to say: "The file system that has come closest to our design principles, other than ZFS itself, is WAFL... the first commercial file system to use the copy-on-write tree of blocks approach to file system consistency." One of the first patents I filed at NetApp describes this "copy-on-write tree of blocks" technique in detail.
This has to be the one of the greatest examples of how patents can go against public interest. How can I have a system as reliable as ZFS or WAFL for my home? Answer: I can't. There's no way I can afford even the most "entry level" server from netapp (or Sun, for the matter). Luckily Sun gives away ZFS and we all can benefit from it. If you look closely at it, NetApp sues Sun for making technology available for the masses, and that's a big no. Damn commies, those sun folks.
Ah, but is the bandwidth a non-renewable resource? Thought so. The bandwidth price is completely artificial. You see, once the equipment is set up, all the data flowing through it is F R E E. Is FREE for an ISDN line. FREE for an OC48, and yes, FREE for DSL and Cable. Sure, there are operational costs (mainly power and salaries), and SOME investment in equipment, but other than that, you don't pay Cisco for every bit flowing through an interface. In other words, operating a DSL line or a 10-gigabit link costs basically the same. The $30k per month cost is the typical "ah, but this is a CORPORATE line, it means big corporations use them, so we will charge what they can PAY". That is, the cost is set for the target audience, not for what it really costs.
I mean, when ISPs peer with each other, they exchange traffic for free. Why can't I connect to a peering point then? I'll pay for the fiber to the meet-me-room. I'll pay for the equipment too. I mean, once you peer with Verizon, Comcast, whatever (I don't know, I'm not US-based), you have almost unlimited bandwidth to those providers (and they represent a huge part of your traffic). Then you connect to a DSL for to the rest of the world and that's it, a couple GB/s to the large providers and a few megs to the rest... but of course, you can't just peer with Comcast;)
And proof that bandwidth costs are so overrated are South Korea, Japan, and Sweden (50Mbit). How can they manage to provide you with a full 50Mb/s link for the same as you pay in the US for 8Mbit? Answer: they invested on their networks, and now have bandwidth to spare. US ISPs didn't, and that's what you got.
The sad thing about all this is that most people (you, for example) believe the big ISPs when they say "oh but we are basically giving it away to you! look how much more THIS connection costs".
Why would you put 320 GB of data at the mercy of TrueCrypt? A few hundred megabytes of sensitive files, sure... but 320 GB?
Whole-partition encryption. It's easier and faster than a file container. You don't need to install truecrypt (on Windows) in order to run it, so you can carry your disk around. If someone steals it, well... he got himself a great drive, but not my data. If my drive fails under warranty, I don't like the fact that computer techs look around your files when they "test" your drive, so they can look all they want, my data won't be available to them.
I lost, completely lost, 320GB of data due to the piece of shit Truecrypt for Linux, supposedly "stable". If you have 320GB of data, if you are brave enough to play with LVM and software RAID and you also smack TrueCrypt on it. Well... You are expected to have enough clue to have backups... If you do not..
No, the fucked drive wasn't part of the LVM or software RAID. It was just an external eSATA drive, which never had any problems under Windows XP. I just mounted it, read a little, write a little (FAT32 for "cross-platform")... BAM! all my data, gone. So I'm now building a 4x500GB raidz for backups (incremental and all with zfs snapshots). And the 320GB drive is working fine under Windows again.
With some luck, ZFS booting will change software raid. I was impressed with the video on youtube with those german guys making a ZFS array on some USB sticks, exporting it, shuffling the drives and connecting them anywhere, then importing it back and have ZFS take care of everything. A software raid that will boot from any drive? That's something (OK, OK, linux already does, LILO is smart enough to install itself in the MBR of all the drives in the array and linux can boot from a degraded aray, provided there are enough drives).
It is quite entertaining to see Murdock making such claims. He actually forgets that the greatest strength of Linux is that most of its codebase is understandable. While it may be missing some high end enterprise bells and whistles a relative newbe can sit down and understand most of the code straight away. Granted, his attempts at coding anything for it may end up being futile, but he will like it none the less.
I wonder how many Linux users are actually programmers? Like 1%, I guess? Sure, in 1991 when it was released, every user was a programmer. But now it's the opposite. Few users will do so much as recompiling a kernel, and even so, you don't need to be a programmer to do that.
On top of it he has the greatest possible documentation - the code and it is readable.
What? Are you on crack? Code is NOT documentation. You HAVE to add a manual somewhere, else it's "just a program". And that's the biggest problem with Linux. Documentation. There's a million things you can do and very few of them are documented. So you have to google everything. You'll have to end up at some obscure list server (which WILL be offline when you click on it, so pray that web.archive.org has a copy).
The other day I had this situation: A SCSI drive failed and md was degraded (raid-1). The drive was unaccessible, I didn't know that. So I went ahead and installed a new kernel. LILO was bitching about not being able to find/dev/sdb. So I go an run LILO again and forget to add the "-t" switch. WRONG - bootloader is fucked now.
I had to boot Debian Rescue, mount my drive (it's a LVM on MD). I figured, what I had to do was just very simple:
boot
mount the partition
lilo and read the config file from the partition... that didn't work, the files weren't there
ok, so I chroot into the directory. lilo. didn't work either, something about/proc
ls/proc. empty. what the hell? mount/proc. ls/proc. all there. lilo. bingo!
I would love to see a newbie doing all that guesswork just to recover a fucked MBR.
Regarding to the "high end enterprise bells and whistles": ZFS alone made me switch my Linux server to Solaris. I lost, completely lost, 320GB of data due to the piece of shit Truecrypt for Linux, supposedly "stable". Now I have a zpool with iscsi-exported zvols, that took like 2 minutes to make.
The great about solaris is that it WORKS. Right there and then: it just works. If it doesn't work, that's it. They don't pretend that it works only to have it hang at the worst moment (or worse: fuck 320GB of your data). I think that's another problem with Linux: version numbers. Serious programmers put 0.0.1-pre-alpha on their versions, so you kind of know what you can expect. Others just go and version 1.0 (and when you try to run that program, you realize that this isn't a 1.0 version). I don't think corporate folks like beta software, and that's what keeps Linux off the enterprise too.
Linux makes a great LAMP server, Asterisk server, etc. But that's because of the support behind those products. Asterisk, PHP, etc are backed by serious companies.
And don't let me get started on the stupid fights about the scheduler, while this isn't an issue on Solaris (http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/new_linux_sched uler_old_solaris), because that's what really makes me doubt about the Bazaar way of software development. Don't get me wrong, I think that's great, but when shit starts to fly around, I start looking for alternatives.
That's what I tried, I mean, I always use the "save for web" tool, which is great. Is there where I get smaller GIFs than PNGs. The problem is that Photoshop only allows to sabe 8-bit or 24-bit PNGs, while GIFs allows indexing down to 1 color, if needed (to make, say, a spacer. Not that I ever used those! But before CSS these were very popular).
Maybe I can index PNG's pallette, didn't actually look in depth for that. But I'll try next time.
Photoshop has always given best results compressing in either GIF or JPEG. I use PNGs only when I need an alpha channel (because GIF transparency it's really out of date), and for that it works great.
I don't care if it renders differently in IE. People who would notice that, would use firefox (or opera, whatever) already. People who use IE, wouldn't tell the difference anyway.
You are confused. "Zero tolerance" was with respect to the theater, they alway file charges in other words. There is no "zero tolerance" with respect to sentencing in this regard, a judge has the discretion to take the context of the offense into consideration and just give her a slap on the wrist.
Err, no. The teather can do whatever they want, the judiciary system is, in the first instance, a judge, who can just throw away the case, dismiss it, call it whatever you want. I was refering to the fact that the original poster mentioned something about "paying a fine" or whatever. Tiny crimes such as this ought to be handled by the police, as it usually happens (a police officer scaring a some kid, or something). It doesn't have to escalate to this.
You also misrepresent "zero tolerance", under some circumstances it is reasonable. For example in some states if someone reports being assaulted in a domestic abuse situation the police must arrest the person who committed the assault.
That's a different story. The police will take both parties into "custody", take their statements, and according to the law either detain or release the suspect (or the accused).
There is no "zero tolerance" in life. Schools with "zero tolerance" policies claim better "results" or whatever. "Anything that can be used as a weapon IS a weapon". Yeah, whatever. You can take an utility kife, a nail file, even some "non-safety" scissors from a kid. But I can still stab you with a pencil, or a pen. I can strangle you with the laces of my shoe. I can break your neck with a chair.... you see my point? Ask a prison guard what he thinks about that kind of "zero tolerance" at schools and he will laugh at you. In short, anything can be a weapon. That's why I think "zero tolerance" is, in most (if not all) cases, ridiculous and useless.
If her story holds up, I doubt she'll get more than a minor slap on the wrist, probably in the form of a fine.
Let me see: why wouldn't it hold up? IF they were trying to STEAL the movie, they would've started at the beginning, and I doubt they'll record anything interesting in those 20 seconds. (And it's really easy to see if they did record 20 seconds AND which part of the movie was that) But more importantly: WHY should she get ANY kind of punishment? "Zero-tolerance" is an american term invented to justify the lawyers actions. It's a shame that the US judiciary system allows itself to be abused that way, for so little and insignificant things.
Let me put it this way: if these things continue, soon we'll be only allowed to hear music on earphones. Because if you listen too loud in your house and SOMEONE can hear it from the street, then you're doing a public playback of your music, and you will certainly go to jail for that!
That's what I said. Cold war drove the USSR's economy to hell, because of the US constantly picking on the USSR. If the US didn't do that, I don't think they would have had such a powerful Red Army (they grew exponentially during the cold war, not before that). And because of that, they might have had a better economy, without a need to attack either France or anyone in the West.
Look at china now. They are communists, but they never hurt anyone (agreed, except a few neighbors), they never tried to expaind their evil red empire all over the world. That's what I think it would have been with the USSR. But the USSR was too near from the Masters of the Universe® (the US), and their Super Friends® (UK, France, Germany...).
But China is under US control now, economically. The US have a huge debt with China. If some day China tries something weird... the US just has to push a few buttons an drive China's economy to hell. No need for WMDs.
Ah, yes, but you missed my point. It's not about the government providing everything for free. It's about having options. It's about balance. Socialism and communism are extremes, but wild capitalism is also an extreme. I trust my government, I work already and my retirement fund is in the state system from the first day, because I chose so. My neighbor might have chosen a private retirement fund, good for him! I also chose private healthcare, but my mom is a retired "government employee" (a teacher, go figure), so she used a mix of both. You see?
Another example: Spain. France. Germany. I could go on, but those countries are, to a great extent, socialist. Are they worse than America? Don't they get better? (because you say that taking care of yourself, or your community, makes it better). Let me give you an example, and this is true. I have a friend who lives in spain, and he has a young daughter. He told me that the government sent him a letter, reminding him that the girl didn't go to the dentist in over a year. It reminded him that it was free, any dentist he wanted. Scary? I don't think so. That's what I mean by "the government taking care of you". Sure, they don't do it because it's nice, they do it because detecting a cavity early is cheaper than paying for tooth extraction or whatever. But, when was the last time your HMO sent you a letter, reminding you that you should get a check-up?
It's more of a thing of altruism I think. You may never understand me, because we see different things. Let me see if I can explain what I think: you are afraid of giving power to the government, because they will come back later to expect something from you. I see it more, you may say idealistically, but well, I think the government is the PEOPLE. The government gives me things (health, whatever), and it expects me to pay taxes, and nothing else. You too are afraid of your government, because of the way you think (warning: I'm not saying it's wrong, I just say I think different): you always expect something in return, and you think everyone else also expects something in return. Well, I think the government is more harmless than a big corporation. Sure, a huge government monopolizing everything is not healthier either.
Do I hate big corporations? Certainly not, I try to avoid them whenever I can, because you give them more power if you buy things from them. But obviously there are certain things, huge things, that can't be paid by small companies: A large scale network, like the phone, cable, well those are examples of things that can't be done by small companies.
But then you have the big corporation scandals, all over the place. Enron, Worldcom... A tiny government that allows itself to be lobbied, and that's what happens. Big corporations care only about the numbers, and WILL fuck anything they need in order to keep their numbers high enough (the premise is "it's never enough").
You also say that "Spending that money brought down the Iron Curtain and freed western Europe." What? Are you on crack or what? That money actually help build the iron curtain. The USSR wasn't as bad as you and I were told it was. If they were poor it was only because you provoked them, you made them spend more and more in weapons and military. If you weren't there to bother them, they MIGHT have been a happy communist country, and nothing else. But no, america can't stand the idea of communism, not even socialism, so we have to destroy it. You didn't free western europe either. You only went there because the japs touched your ass. It wasn't your war. Vietnam wasn't either, and you were there to "free" them.
See it this way: If you didn't shake the USSR, maybe they wouldn't have needed so many AK-47s. Those AK's wouldn't be in the hand of muslim extremists now. They wouldn't be so powerful, maybe 9/11 wouldn't have happened if you didn't bring down the iron courtain. That's how I see it.
Dude, wake up. War is business. Billions of dollars in the hands of the corporations who make the weapons, and that's
This isn't an anti-american post, this is the point of view of someone outside America, so please think twice before downmodding. So, here we go.
so what? I mean, americans have this weird sense of what's right and what's wrong. For one, Spanish seems to be some kind of dirty language, something only ugly dark-skinned people speak. It's the language of evil. What's wrong with being bilingual? If schools start teaching spanish people complain. Why? I mean... "the more you know", right? If instead of speaking one language, you can speak 2? That's cool, opens a lot of possibilities.
Also, america is also ashamed of the south. You like white christmas and all that crap, and also, that's the way christmas is supposed to be. I wonder if christmas is white in Florida, or even in New Orleans? No, but you don't talk about that. People in those places go barefoot and drive in dirt roads, ewww. They also chase alligators and fish in the mississippi. I mean, if you're fishing it MUST be in some pretty lake or a crystaline river, surrounded by mountains and brown maple leaves in fucking vermont.
What the fuck is wrong with you people? There's a whole world of things, languages, foods, places, and you complain because ILLEGALS ARE TAKING OUR JOBS AND NOT PAYING TAXES! What good are taxes for? I mean, in my country I can at least get FREE medical attention, even AIDS drugs. Even if I don't have a job and don't pay taxes. Hell, even if I'm not a citizen, I can still get all of that. Do you pay your taxes? What do these taxes do anyway? You need to pay for health, food, college. In my country, at least I can CHOOSE. I can pay for health, or use the State health services (sometimes the latter is better). I can go to a private university, but I can also go (and I do) to a state-funded university (and my degree is just as good in any of them). And I can even get free food from the government (and not food stamps, to be treated like scum at the store).
Do you realize that you are living in a country that spends half of the WORLD'S combined budgets in defense? What good has it been? You had 9/11, but "nobody saw that coming". You had Katrina, but "nobody saw that coming". And it's your fault, because you whine about Wal-Mart, but still buy there. You whine about the illegal immigrants, but if you were a store owner, you would hire one. You whine about catastrophes (natural or terrorism), but you don't have the people you need, because they're fighting in a war far away, trying to STEAL resources from a poor country.
America has the potential to be a fucking PARADISE, if you only cut the crap, the fear of "socialism" and "communism", the "take care of yourself and fuck everyone else" attitude. America never sleeps, they're ever waiting for doomsday to happen, the day China, Korea, or even some crappy island in the pacific will try to attack you. But instead of just waiting, you go and provoke everyone, showing off your weapons and killing innocent people all over the world. Dude, NOTHING will happen to america. Just stop messing with the rest of the world. In the process you will save BILLIONS of dollars, that could be spent in education, health, etc. But no, you have been brainwashed into thinking "that's communism!".
What good is the government for? Are they only there to "govern" you? To tell you what to do? (You know, only in the world's worst dictatorships a police officer draws his gun and put it in your head, let alone "take you in custody" for no reason other than suspected terrorism. Oh yea, and in america that happens too. IF a police officer tells you to get out of the car, and you don't obey, you are likely to be put in front of a loaded gun, or maced. Even if your children are in the car.) You know what that is? That's the government AFRAID of you. How can you live in a country where the government is afraid of you? In my country 15 years ago we gave the people the option to have their retirement funds in a 401(k)-like system. Your money was invested, you get interests from it, etc. Now a
What most people consider full-featured Cisco includes IOS, and I doubt they're planning to put IOS on a home wireless router (certainly not for $50).
True. On the legendary Cisco 677 ADSL Modem they included a cut-down version of IOS named CBOS (Cisco Broadband Operating System). It was very IOS-like, but had only what was needed to route PPP over ATM (including NAT).
Ah, the 677. Good memories. A fine piece of hardware, considering it was designed in something like 1997 (not by cisco but by NetSpeed Corporation, judging by the BIOS). Mine worked from 2001 well until 2006 when a lightning finished it (well, not quite, it worked for 2 months more at my cousin's. She lives like 5 blocks away from the CO). Replaced it with some cheap, single-chip ADSL/ADSL2+ modem, which has not given any problems, and also gives 10ms less latency. Poor Cisco, it had to do some heavy calculations on my Telco's FEC. The new modem, I assume, has some ASIC that does all the job (the 677 doesn't, it's completely covered in ICs, which explains the extra 10ms).
University class, "Information Systems engineering". In the first year we have "Algebra and Analytic Geometry", "Mathematical Analysis 1" (Calculus 1), and "Discrete Mathematics". In the second year there's "Mathematical Analysis II", "Probability and Statistics". (And the non-math ones, such as algorithms and data structures, systems analysis, computers architecture, "engineering and society" --a fancy name for "philosophy"--, operating systems...)
the latter is just the excuse for the public. People won't give up their rights to prevent terrorism (which is likely to happen in Europe), but they will in order to stop "child abuse", which is not likely to happen in Europe or the US (it does happen, it happens everywhere. But some countries, especially asian and other poor regions, suffer more from that. And those places don't have the resources to combat that).
If the US and Europe are interested in protecting the children, they would be better off spending some money to stop child prostution in asia, instead of busting 10 basement-dwelling pedophiles and making a big fuss of it.
Link is a private company, they provide services to state-owned banks. Athough many of those banks are privatized now.
Regarding to Argentina's reputation, well, sort of. It started in 1976 when we accepted ideas from the IMF and the World Bank. Our currency, the peso, was pegged to the US dollar for 10 years, when we were the IMF's prodigy, the best in the world, recovering from a 5-figure inflation in a few years... until 2002 when we decided to stop paying for the debt's INTERESTS (not the WHOLE debt). Actually the interests were FAR higher (8 to 10 times) than the original debt.
At the end of 2001, some banks took the people's money and left the country (Scotiabank), and others stayed but converted the people's dollar accounts to Pesos (and the peso was $3 to USD 1, so they indeed took 66% of our savings. PEOPLE'S life savings). Before that, when people tried to get their money out of their bank accounts in December of 2001, the government decided that we weren't allowed to do that, because there was not enough cash for everyone. So EVERYONE tried to do just that, and that's when it just exploded, and banks just stated, like Citi still does:
Sucursal de Citibank, N.A. establecida en la República Argentina.
Citibank realiza su actividad bancaria en Argentina a través de su sucursal. La responsabilidad de Citibank emergente de esas operaciones, en particular por depósitos y demás obligaciones aceptados por su sucursal en Argentina, se encuentra limitada por las disposiciones contractuales aplicables en cada caso, la legislación vigente en Argentina y en los Estados Unidos de América y por el acaecimiento de eventos de riesgo político en Argentina. Los depósitos y demás obligaciones aceptados en Argentina son pagaderos únicamente en Argentina en una sucursal de Citibank y son pagaderos únicamente con los activos de la sucursal de Citibank en Argentina.
Rough translation: A branch of Citibank, N.A., incorporated in Argentina. Citibank does their bank business in argentina through their branch. Citibank's responsibility on those operations, especially on deposits and other obligations accepted by their Argentina branch, are limited by contractual dispositions that apply in each case, by the laws of Argentina, and the USA, and for EVENTS OF POLITICAL RISK IN ARGENTINA. Deposits and other obligations accepted in Argentina are to be paid only in Argentina, on a Citibank Argentina branch, and are only BACKED BY THE ARGENTINA BRANCH ASSETS"
We are supposedly bad about paying our debts, like the Italian investors (average people poorly advised, like here http://www.escapeartist.com/international/0800_arg entina.html): they bought HIGH RISK bonds in 2001, those bonds paid about a 100% YEARLY INTEREST RATE. That is, you bought bonds for 10.000 USD, a year later you cash them for 20.000 USD. I mean, dude, if something looks too good to be true, then it probably is (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4196/is_2 0040314/ai_n10950382). A country so desperate for money, you can't trust it.
That looks bad, but look closely at what Citi (the largest finance company in the world) says: "we are glad to do business with you, but if something goes wrong, we just pack our things and GET THE FUCK OUT, and take your money". Citi MAKES money in Argentina, and then takes it to the US. Seems fair to me. BUT, if something goes wrong, like, everyone trying to get their money at the same thing, Citi WILL NOT cover that with US money. Zero-risk investment, don't you think?
About the Italian investments, don't worry. We did pay those people. It was like this: We paid 25% of your original investment (yes, if you put $1000 we give you back just 250. Sorry), OR, we refinance that to 20 YEARS. That works out to a 5% yearly interest rate, which is still a pretty good deal. US Treasury bonds have t
I live in Argentina, and I've had this for a long time already. There are 2 ATM networks here. Link and Banelco. Link is usually used by government-owned banks, and Banelco for private banks. Banelco is years ahead of links in a lot of features, including mobile banking: a Java app where I can check account status, movements, balance, make transfers, pay bills, whatever. Citibank Argentina uses Banelco so yes, if I were a Citibank customer I'd have this feature too (but I am a customer of Standard Bank, formerly --2 months ago-- BankBoston. It was the last BankBoston in existence -- Fleet or Bank of America didn't rename it, so 2007 was the last time the brand "Boston" was used. Not a nice way of ending a bank that operated in my country (1790) since it was even a country (only in 1816 we had independence from Spain). Also Standard is so boring with their white-on-blue logo:)
Oh, yes, Standard, like Boston (and HSBC, Citi, BBVA, Santander,...), uses Banelco. So I do have this feature (and a Visa debit card). And I use it quite often.
I think everything has its place. Most regular, low-bandwidth content works great in Wireless. But I wouldn't take the risk to run everything on wireless. I mean, I have a desktop computer. I won't me moving it anytime soon, so why would I replace my CAT6 with a wireless card? If I had a laptop computer, of course I'd go for a wireless network. So, why replace wires?
I know I'm a special kind of user. I have a home network and a file server, network shares, whatever. In particular, that home server/linux router runs MLDonkey while my "workstation" happily sleeps. If I download a DVD image, I need it to be on my hard drive ASAP. I wouldn't want to wait a for 4GB file on a wireless connection, no matter if it's one of those "108 megs G+". I have CAT6, Gigabit switches, PCI Express gigabit adapters and SATA-2 NCQ RAID, so yes, I can get a sustained throughput that can choke 100Mbit Fast Ethernet. I run SMB, iSCSI and NFS shares. I wouldn't want that exposed on a Wireless connection.
And a medium-sized business will run many of those things. Would you want to handle all that traffic on wireless? If you had 50 users accessing that, would you want to be responsible for a wireless network?
As I said, everything has its place. And wires are here to stay for many years still.
Slashdot Mirror
This has to be the one of the greatest examples of how patents can go against public interest. How can I have a system as reliable as ZFS or WAFL for my home? Answer: I can't. There's no way I can afford even the most "entry level" server from netapp (or Sun, for the matter). Luckily Sun gives away ZFS and we all can benefit from it. If you look closely at it, NetApp sues Sun for making technology available for the masses, and that's a big no. Damn commies, those sun folks.
Ah, but is the bandwidth a non-renewable resource? Thought so. The bandwidth price is completely artificial. You see, once the equipment is set up, all the data flowing through it is F R E E. Is FREE for an ISDN line. FREE for an OC48, and yes, FREE for DSL and Cable. Sure, there are operational costs (mainly power and salaries), and SOME investment in equipment, but other than that, you don't pay Cisco for every bit flowing through an interface. In other words, operating a DSL line or a 10-gigabit link costs basically the same. The $30k per month cost is the typical "ah, but this is a CORPORATE line, it means big corporations use them, so we will charge what they can PAY". That is, the cost is set for the target audience, not for what it really costs.
;)
I mean, when ISPs peer with each other, they exchange traffic for free. Why can't I connect to a peering point then? I'll pay for the fiber to the meet-me-room. I'll pay for the equipment too. I mean, once you peer with Verizon, Comcast, whatever (I don't know, I'm not US-based), you have almost unlimited bandwidth to those providers (and they represent a huge part of your traffic). Then you connect to a DSL for to the rest of the world and that's it, a couple GB/s to the large providers and a few megs to the rest... but of course, you can't just peer with Comcast
And proof that bandwidth costs are so overrated are South Korea, Japan, and Sweden (50Mbit). How can they manage to provide you with a full 50Mb/s link for the same as you pay in the US for 8Mbit? Answer: they invested on their networks, and now have bandwidth to spare. US ISPs didn't, and that's what you got.
The sad thing about all this is that most people (you, for example) believe the big ISPs when they say "oh but we are basically giving it away to you! look how much more THIS connection costs".
With some luck, ZFS booting will change software raid. I was impressed with the video on youtube with those german guys making a ZFS array on some USB sticks, exporting it, shuffling the drives and connecting them anywhere, then importing it back and have ZFS take care of everything. A software raid that will boot from any drive? That's something (OK, OK, linux already does, LILO is smart enough to install itself in the MBR of all the drives in the array and linux can boot from a degraded aray, provided there are enough drives).
What? Are you on crack? Code is NOT documentation. You HAVE to add a manual somewhere, else it's "just a program". And that's the biggest problem with Linux. Documentation. There's a million things you can do and very few of them are documented. So you have to google everything. You'll have to end up at some obscure list server (which WILL be offline when you click on it, so pray that web.archive.org has a copy).
The other day I had this situation: A SCSI drive failed and md was degraded (raid-1). The drive was unaccessible, I didn't know that. So I went ahead and installed a new kernel. LILO was bitching about not being able to find
I had to boot Debian Rescue, mount my drive (it's a LVM on MD). I figured, what I had to do was just very simple:
boot
mount the partition
lilo and read the config file from the partition... that didn't work, the files weren't there
ok, so I chroot into the directory. lilo. didn't work either, something about
ls
I would love to see a newbie doing all that guesswork just to recover a fucked MBR.
Regarding to the "high end enterprise bells and whistles": ZFS alone made me switch my Linux server to Solaris. I lost, completely lost, 320GB of data due to the piece of shit Truecrypt for Linux, supposedly "stable". Now I have a zpool with iscsi-exported zvols, that took like 2 minutes to make.
The great about solaris is that it WORKS. Right there and then: it just works. If it doesn't work, that's it. They don't pretend that it works only to have it hang at the worst moment (or worse: fuck 320GB of your data). I think that's another problem with Linux: version numbers. Serious programmers put 0.0.1-pre-alpha on their versions, so you kind of know what you can expect. Others just go and version 1.0 (and when you try to run that program, you realize that this isn't a 1.0 version). I don't think corporate folks like beta software, and that's what keeps Linux off the enterprise too.
Linux makes a great LAMP server, Asterisk server, etc. But that's because of the support behind those products. Asterisk, PHP, etc are backed by serious companies.
And don't let me get started on the stupid fights about the scheduler, while this isn't an issue on Solaris (http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/new_linux_sche
But never use AES, it's a government booby trap!
That's what I tried, I mean, I always use the "save for web" tool, which is great. Is there where I get smaller GIFs than PNGs. The problem is that Photoshop only allows to sabe 8-bit or 24-bit PNGs, while GIFs allows indexing down to 1 color, if needed (to make, say, a spacer. Not that I ever used those! But before CSS these were very popular).
Maybe I can index PNG's pallette, didn't actually look in depth for that. But I'll try next time.
Photoshop has always given best results compressing in either GIF or JPEG. I use PNGs only when I need an alpha channel (because GIF transparency it's really out of date), and for that it works great. I don't care if it renders differently in IE. People who would notice that, would use firefox (or opera, whatever) already. People who use IE, wouldn't tell the difference anyway.
HA! I hate not having mod points for this article. +5 Funny!
But more importantly: WHY should she get ANY kind of punishment? "Zero-tolerance" is an american term invented to justify the lawyers actions. It's a shame that the US judiciary system allows itself to be abused that way, for so little and insignificant things.
Let me put it this way: if these things continue, soon we'll be only allowed to hear music on earphones. Because if you listen too loud in your house and SOMEONE can hear it from the street, then you're doing a public playback of your music, and you will certainly go to jail for that!
That's what I said. Cold war drove the USSR's economy to hell, because of the US constantly picking on the USSR. If the US didn't do that, I don't think they would have had such a powerful Red Army (they grew exponentially during the cold war, not before that). And because of that, they might have had a better economy, without a need to attack either France or anyone in the West.
Look at china now. They are communists, but they never hurt anyone (agreed, except a few neighbors), they never tried to expaind their evil red empire all over the world. That's what I think it would have been with the USSR. But the USSR was too near from the Masters of the Universe® (the US), and their Super Friends® (UK, France, Germany...).
But China is under US control now, economically. The US have a huge debt with China. If some day China tries something weird... the US just has to push a few buttons an drive China's economy to hell. No need for WMDs.
Ah, yes, but you missed my point. It's not about the government providing everything for free. It's about having options. It's about balance. Socialism and communism are extremes, but wild capitalism is also an extreme. I trust my government, I work already and my retirement fund is in the state system from the first day, because I chose so. My neighbor might have chosen a private retirement fund, good for him! I also chose private healthcare, but my mom is a retired "government employee" (a teacher, go figure), so she used a mix of both. You see?
Another example: Spain. France. Germany. I could go on, but those countries are, to a great extent, socialist. Are they worse than America? Don't they get better? (because you say that taking care of yourself, or your community, makes it better). Let me give you an example, and this is true. I have a friend who lives in spain, and he has a young daughter. He told me that the government sent him a letter, reminding him that the girl didn't go to the dentist in over a year. It reminded him that it was free, any dentist he wanted. Scary? I don't think so. That's what I mean by "the government taking care of you". Sure, they don't do it because it's nice, they do it because detecting a cavity early is cheaper than paying for tooth extraction or whatever. But, when was the last time your HMO sent you a letter, reminding you that you should get a check-up?
It's more of a thing of altruism I think. You may never understand me, because we see different things. Let me see if I can explain what I think: you are afraid of giving power to the government, because they will come back later to expect something from you. I see it more, you may say idealistically, but well, I think the government is the PEOPLE. The government gives me things (health, whatever), and it expects me to pay taxes, and nothing else. You too are afraid of your government, because of the way you think (warning: I'm not saying it's wrong, I just say I think different): you always expect something in return, and you think everyone else also expects something in return. Well, I think the government is more harmless than a big corporation. Sure, a huge government monopolizing everything is not healthier either.
Do I hate big corporations? Certainly not, I try to avoid them whenever I can, because you give them more power if you buy things from them. But obviously there are certain things, huge things, that can't be paid by small companies: A large scale network, like the phone, cable, well those are examples of things that can't be done by small companies.
But then you have the big corporation scandals, all over the place. Enron, Worldcom... A tiny government that allows itself to be lobbied, and that's what happens. Big corporations care only about the numbers, and WILL fuck anything they need in order to keep their numbers high enough (the premise is "it's never enough").
You also say that "Spending that money brought down the Iron Curtain and freed western Europe." What? Are you on crack or what? That money actually help build the iron curtain. The USSR wasn't as bad as you and I were told it was. If they were poor it was only because you provoked them, you made them spend more and more in weapons and military. If you weren't there to bother them, they MIGHT have been a happy communist country, and nothing else. But no, america can't stand the idea of communism, not even socialism, so we have to destroy it. You didn't free western europe either. You only went there because the japs touched your ass. It wasn't your war. Vietnam wasn't either, and you were there to "free" them.
See it this way: If you didn't shake the USSR, maybe they wouldn't have needed so many AK-47s. Those AK's wouldn't be in the hand of muslim extremists now. They wouldn't be so powerful, maybe 9/11 wouldn't have happened if you didn't bring down the iron courtain. That's how I see it.
Dude, wake up. War is business. Billions of dollars in the hands of the corporations who make the weapons, and that's
This isn't an anti-american post, this is the point of view of someone outside America, so please think twice before downmodding. So, here we go.
so what? I mean, americans have this weird sense of what's right and what's wrong. For one, Spanish seems to be some kind of dirty language, something only ugly dark-skinned people speak. It's the language of evil. What's wrong with being bilingual? If schools start teaching spanish people complain. Why? I mean... "the more you know", right? If instead of speaking one language, you can speak 2? That's cool, opens a lot of possibilities.
Also, america is also ashamed of the south. You like white christmas and all that crap, and also, that's the way christmas is supposed to be. I wonder if christmas is white in Florida, or even in New Orleans? No, but you don't talk about that. People in those places go barefoot and drive in dirt roads, ewww. They also chase alligators and fish in the mississippi. I mean, if you're fishing it MUST be in some pretty lake or a crystaline river, surrounded by mountains and brown maple leaves in fucking vermont.
What the fuck is wrong with you people? There's a whole world of things, languages, foods, places, and you complain because ILLEGALS ARE TAKING OUR JOBS AND NOT PAYING TAXES! What good are taxes for? I mean, in my country I can at least get FREE medical attention, even AIDS drugs. Even if I don't have a job and don't pay taxes. Hell, even if I'm not a citizen, I can still get all of that. Do you pay your taxes? What do these taxes do anyway? You need to pay for health, food, college. In my country, at least I can CHOOSE. I can pay for health, or use the State health services (sometimes the latter is better). I can go to a private university, but I can also go (and I do) to a state-funded university (and my degree is just as good in any of them). And I can even get free food from the government (and not food stamps, to be treated like scum at the store).
Do you realize that you are living in a country that spends half of the WORLD'S combined budgets in defense? What good has it been? You had 9/11, but "nobody saw that coming". You had Katrina, but "nobody saw that coming". And it's your fault, because you whine about Wal-Mart, but still buy there. You whine about the illegal immigrants, but if you were a store owner, you would hire one. You whine about catastrophes (natural or terrorism), but you don't have the people you need, because they're fighting in a war far away, trying to STEAL resources from a poor country.
America has the potential to be a fucking PARADISE, if you only cut the crap, the fear of "socialism" and "communism", the "take care of yourself and fuck everyone else" attitude. America never sleeps, they're ever waiting for doomsday to happen, the day China, Korea, or even some crappy island in the pacific will try to attack you. But instead of just waiting, you go and provoke everyone, showing off your weapons and killing innocent people all over the world. Dude, NOTHING will happen to america. Just stop messing with the rest of the world. In the process you will save BILLIONS of dollars, that could be spent in education, health, etc. But no, you have been brainwashed into thinking "that's communism!".
What good is the government for? Are they only there to "govern" you? To tell you what to do? (You know, only in the world's worst dictatorships a police officer draws his gun and put it in your head, let alone "take you in custody" for no reason other than suspected terrorism. Oh yea, and in america that happens too. IF a police officer tells you to get out of the car, and you don't obey, you are likely to be put in front of a loaded gun, or maced. Even if your children are in the car.) You know what that is? That's the government AFRAID of you. How can you live in a country where the government is afraid of you? In my country 15 years ago we gave the people the option to have their retirement funds in a 401(k)-like system. Your money was invested, you get interests from it, etc. Now a
Ah, the 677. Good memories. A fine piece of hardware, considering it was designed in something like 1997 (not by cisco but by NetSpeed Corporation, judging by the BIOS). Mine worked from 2001 well until 2006 when a lightning finished it (well, not quite, it worked for 2 months more at my cousin's. She lives like 5 blocks away from the CO). Replaced it with some cheap, single-chip ADSL/ADSL2+ modem, which has not given any problems, and also gives 10ms less latency. Poor Cisco, it had to do some heavy calculations on my Telco's FEC. The new modem, I assume, has some ASIC that does all the job (the 677 doesn't, it's completely covered in ICs, which explains the extra 10ms).
I'd love to see you do your calculus homework by tapping it in some keyboard. rare/obsolete skill. whatever dude.
model 95 computer eh? with a matching UID and all.
Ha. Tomorrow the FBI will tell us that they're using that data to find pedophiles online, so it'll all be OK.
I mean, if they don't think of the children, who will?
University class, "Information Systems engineering". In the first year we have "Algebra and Analytic Geometry", "Mathematical Analysis 1" (Calculus 1), and "Discrete Mathematics". In the second year there's "Mathematical Analysis II", "Probability and Statistics". (And the non-math ones, such as algorithms and data structures, systems analysis, computers architecture, "engineering and society" --a fancy name for "philosophy"--, operating systems...)
My algebra class: 80 males and 3 females (6 actually but the other 3 are really ugly).
the latter is just the excuse for the public. People won't give up their rights to prevent terrorism (which is likely to happen in Europe), but they will in order to stop "child abuse", which is not likely to happen in Europe or the US (it does happen, it happens everywhere. But some countries, especially asian and other poor regions, suffer more from that. And those places don't have the resources to combat that).
If the US and Europe are interested in protecting the children, they would be better off spending some money to stop child prostution in asia, instead of busting 10 basement-dwelling pedophiles and making a big fuss of it.
Won't someone please think of the children!?
Regarding to Argentina's reputation, well, sort of. It started in 1976 when we accepted ideas from the IMF and the World Bank. Our currency, the peso, was pegged to the US dollar for 10 years, when we were the IMF's prodigy, the best in the world, recovering from a 5-figure inflation in a few years... until 2002 when we decided to stop paying for the debt's INTERESTS (not the WHOLE debt). Actually the interests were FAR higher (8 to 10 times) than the original debt.
At the end of 2001, some banks took the people's money and left the country (Scotiabank), and others stayed but converted the people's dollar accounts to Pesos (and the peso was $3 to USD 1, so they indeed took 66% of our savings. PEOPLE'S life savings). Before that, when people tried to get their money out of their bank accounts in December of 2001, the government decided that we weren't allowed to do that, because there was not enough cash for everyone. So EVERYONE tried to do just that, and that's when it just exploded, and banks just stated, like Citi still does:
Rough translation: A branch of Citibank, N.A., incorporated in Argentina. Citibank does their bank business in argentina through their branch. Citibank's responsibility on those operations, especially on deposits and other obligations accepted by their Argentina branch, are limited by contractual dispositions that apply in each case, by the laws of Argentina, and the USA, and for EVENTS OF POLITICAL RISK IN ARGENTINA. Deposits and other obligations accepted in Argentina are to be paid only in Argentina, on a Citibank Argentina branch, and are only BACKED BY THE ARGENTINA BRANCH ASSETS"
We are supposedly bad about paying our debts, like the Italian investors (average people poorly advised, like here http://www.escapeartist.com/international/0800_arg entina.html): they bought HIGH RISK bonds in 2001, those bonds paid about a 100% YEARLY INTEREST RATE. That is, you bought bonds for 10.000 USD, a year later you cash them for 20.000 USD. I mean, dude, if something looks too good to be true, then it probably is (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4196/is_2 0040314/ai_n10950382). A country so desperate for money, you can't trust it.
That looks bad, but look closely at what Citi (the largest finance company in the world) says: "we are glad to do business with you, but if something goes wrong, we just pack our things and GET THE FUCK OUT, and take your money". Citi MAKES money in Argentina, and then takes it to the US. Seems fair to me. BUT, if something goes wrong, like, everyone trying to get their money at the same thing, Citi WILL NOT cover that with US money. Zero-risk investment, don't you think?
About the Italian investments, don't worry. We did pay those people. It was like this: We paid 25% of your original investment (yes, if you put $1000 we give you back just 250. Sorry), OR, we refinance that to 20 YEARS. That works out to a 5% yearly interest rate, which is still a pretty good deal. US Treasury bonds have t
I live in Argentina, and I've had this for a long time already. There are 2 ATM networks here. Link and Banelco. Link is usually used by government-owned banks, and Banelco for private banks. Banelco is years ahead of links in a lot of features, including mobile banking: a Java app where I can check account status, movements, balance, make transfers, pay bills, whatever. Citibank Argentina uses Banelco so yes, if I were a Citibank customer I'd have this feature too (but I am a customer of Standard Bank, formerly --2 months ago-- BankBoston. It was the last BankBoston in existence -- Fleet or Bank of America didn't rename it, so 2007 was the last time the brand "Boston" was used. Not a nice way of ending a bank that operated in my country (1790) since it was even a country (only in 1816 we had independence from Spain). Also Standard is so boring with their white-on-blue logo :)
Oh, yes, Standard, like Boston (and HSBC, Citi, BBVA, Santander,...), uses Banelco. So I do have this feature (and a Visa debit card). And I use it quite often.
I think everything has its place. Most regular, low-bandwidth content works great in Wireless. But I wouldn't take the risk to run everything on wireless. I mean, I have a desktop computer. I won't me moving it anytime soon, so why would I replace my CAT6 with a wireless card? If I had a laptop computer, of course I'd go for a wireless network. So, why replace wires?
I know I'm a special kind of user. I have a home network and a file server, network shares, whatever. In particular, that home server/linux router runs MLDonkey while my "workstation" happily sleeps. If I download a DVD image, I need it to be on my hard drive ASAP. I wouldn't want to wait a for 4GB file on a wireless connection, no matter if it's one of those "108 megs G+". I have CAT6, Gigabit switches, PCI Express gigabit adapters and SATA-2 NCQ RAID, so yes, I can get a sustained throughput that can choke 100Mbit Fast Ethernet. I run SMB, iSCSI and NFS shares. I wouldn't want that exposed on a Wireless connection.
And a medium-sized business will run many of those things. Would you want to handle all that traffic on wireless? If you had 50 users accessing that, would you want to be responsible for a wireless network?
As I said, everything has its place. And wires are here to stay for many years still.