Uh, no. The part where I said "On a serious note" should have given that away. Show me where I argued against contingency planning. I'll bet I know as much about business continuity planning/disaster recovery planning as most of the people who are misreading my arguments here, and have written/rewritten my share of such plans.
The grandparent poster said he rebooted every server every Saturday, and came in every Sunday to fix the ones that didn't come up. My argument is that that does not add one bit to system (in the large sense) reliability, it is almost always done to compensate for cheap hardware or shitty *cough*Microsoft*cough* OS'es. Note his words, that he did this every weekend "instead of during the week when a reboot of a critical machine that did not work would be much worse." This does not describe a robust, high-availability system, it describes excuses for crap. You're absolutely right, that in a properly designed system with redundant equipment, hot spares, well-designed and -tested failover mechanisms and good management, you should be able to knock out any piece of equipment or any data path at any time without it causing a crisis. But that wasn't what the grandparent was describing. He was describing a set of systems where you spend every weekend rebooting everything because you'll shit your pants if you have a problem on a Wednesday. Well some of us don't have the luxury of that much downtime. So plan and test away. But every week is just wrong.
it is also will the hardware live through a power cycle
Why should it have to? If it's a critical server, your infrastructure should be such that it never power cycles. Our computer room has "power cycled" once since the facility was built in 1984. And that incident led to spending $65k in consulting engineering services alone, to determine why it happened and develop a plan to prevent it happening again. I'm not even sure what the expenditure in hardware or electrical contracting related to that was. I guess we define "critical" differently.
Yeah, sure, and it's a $1k item. This doesn't answer my question, which is why all the 15" LCD standalone monitors top out at 1024x768, when I have a 15" LCD panel in my laptop which runs at 1400x1050. I want the same (or similar) panel as a desktop monitor. But even the 17" monitors top out at a lower resolution than my laptop. That makes no sense.
And I have no trouble with resolution, my eyes, font sizes, or any application programs which don't know how to adjust.
Every Saturday evening, we rebooted all of our servers
Yeah, we had servers like that once, too. Ba-da-bing! Thanks, I'll be here all week.
On a serious note, am I the only one here who thinks a world in which no one questions a policy like that is insane? We've had critical, and I mean critical, servers that have uptimes measured in years. But then again they run NetWare, or OS/400, or MVS, or.... ABW.
Scheduled reboots are a part of good systems administration
Yeah, scheduled, as part of a disaster recovery test once a year, maybe. Weekly scheduled reboots are a sign of shitty systems. How often do you reboot your Cisco routers?
A big "Thank you" to everyone who doesn't recognize hyperbole or who assumes I don't know how to multiply.
Actually, I do know how to count, thanks, and recognize the difference between fixed and recurring costs. My point is that the market has spoken, and the vast majority (of Americans, anyway) will go for short-term savings over long-term costs. (Look at almost any macroeconomic indicator.) Everyone here who's run more than 20 cartridges, let alone 100, through any inkjet printer, raise your hand. OK, I thought so.
If the number of Americans who actually understand the argument in favor of the $300 printer with $10 cartridges were significant, then the dollar would be a lot stronger, too.
The resolution thing is what I don't understand. I'm typing this on a Dell Latitude laptop, two years old, with what I think is a 15" LCD screen, running at 1400x1050 resolution. Yet in standalone LCD monitors, I have to go to 18-19" to get 1280x1024. Why is that? Why can't I get the LCD panel that's in this PC in a standalone model?
Design a printer (can't be too tough) and make the standard for the parts and consumables an open and free standard so anyone can produce the consumables. Open source the drivers and Voila! Bye Bye HP!
No, bye bye you. The model you present would require selling the printers for more than they cost to manufacture. The current model of HP and everyone else allows them to sell the printer for less than cost, because they make their money on the cartridges. That's why you can get a pretty good printer for well under $100US. Your model would require selling the same printer for at least double, and nobody (repeat, NOBODY) will buy it just because the standard is "open and free".
You will note that there is no legal definition of who is a journalist and who is not
Wrong.
" 'Professional journalist' shall mean one who, for gain or
livelihood, is engaged in gathering, preparing, collecting, writing,
editing, filming, taping or photographing of news intended for a
newspaper, magazine, news agency, press association or wire service or
other professional medium or agency which has as one of its regular
functions the processing and researching of news intended for
dissemination to the public; such person shall be someone performing
said function either as a regular employee or as one otherwise
professionally affiliated for gain or livelihood with such medium of
communication." New York State Consolidated Laws, Article 7, Section 79-h (a)(6)
You will note that there is no legal definition of who is a journalist and who is not
Wrong. " 'Professional journalist' shall mean one who, for gain or
livelihood, is engaged in gathering, preparing, collecting, writing,
editing, filming, taping or photographing of news intended for a
newspaper, magazine, news agency, press association or wire service or
other professional medium or agency which has as one of its regular
functions the processing and researching of news intended for
dissemination to the public; such person shall be someone performing
said function either as a regular employee or as one otherwise
professionally affiliated for gain or livelihood with such medium of
communication." NY State Consolidated Laws, Art. 7, Sec. 79-h (a)(6)
Technically, not obeying a judge's order is breaking the law
Uh, no. Not unless the Legislative and Judicial branches merged while I was asleep last night. He may have chosen not to obey a judicial order, but he didn't break a law.
I'm no lawyer : can a court order someone to reveal its sources?
More and more, the answer is yes. Federal court judge Ernest Torres recently convicted Jim Taricani of the Providence, RI NBC affiliate station of criminal contempt for refusing to name a source. The only reason he didn't send him to jail is that the reporter is a heart transplant recipient who would be endangered by that, so he sentenced him to six months' house arrest instead. Taricani broke no law. Welcome to the new USA.
It was Robert Novak who outed Valerie Plame, not Judith Miller. Where's the outcry to send him to jail? Oh, that's right, he's a conservative, so there isn't any.
If you have a safe deposit box in your name only, and you die
Helps if people know where the safe deposit box is. True story: years ago, my father had a friend who was a financial advisor, who believed strongly in gold. After the guy died suddenly, the wife frantically started calling everyone to see if they knew where the safe deposit box with the Krugerrands was. I don't know if she ever found it (the guy, whom I knew in passing, was paranoid enough that he could easily have pre-paid in cash for a box and left no record -- this was 20+ years ago, when you didn't have to provide fingerprints and a DNA sample to open a savings account.)
I am TIRED of being behind Asian countries. Are we not *supposed* to be the most advanced country on earth.
Not any more. Get used to it. This is the era of the decline and fall of the American empire. My recommendation to my kids is to learn Mandarin.
Just this afternoon, I looked at a completely ordinary photo in this month's IEEE Spectrum magazine about some new chip fab polishing method, which showed five engineers from Applied Materials responsible for it. Four of them were Asian. It's an American company now, but in another ten years they won't need even that.
Apple got the iPod to where it is today by a combination of excellent product design... Not by any kind of technical merit.
Just a nit, but industrial design (which Apple have always been good at) is a technical issue. The fact that Apple has understood that has helped them to be profitable.
So what? What is your point, that because you don't know that many, that therefore it's ok to infringe their copyrights and not pay them any money for their work and the way they have chosen to sell their work?
No, my point is that based on my admittedly anecdotal evidence, along with all other statistics I can find, as well as common sense, the vast majority of working musicians around the world, and probably a substantial majority in the USA, are not affected one way or another by more or less restrictive copyright laws. So the argument put forth by the RIAA and others that if we allow rampant copying of recorded material, music as an art form will effectively cease to exist, is bogus. If Sony/BMG/Warner/Vivendi/Universal/Whatever go out of business tomorrow, then it's probably bad for Britney Spears, but it is not the death of music. Every musician I know (and I know quite a few) will go on playing their music and making about the same $ as they made before.
You want to support musicians? Attend concerts. You want to support a marketing/PR industry? Buy CD's. Over-simplified, sure, but in the right general direction.
I'd argue that most do, either at their art, or at something else which allows them to execute their art in their "spare time". Modern IP laws and modern recording contracts exist largely to benefit the record companies and a VERY FEW "artists". I know many musicians, including my daughter, who make a living as musicians without having heard of the RIAA or ever having published a composition or recording. For comparison, I know zero musicians who have recording contracts with an RIAA-member company. I doubt I'm unique in this.
It's always possible to turn the thermostat down another two degrees and put on a sweater
Been there, done that. Multiple heating zones, programmable thermostats, high-efficiency oil burner, etc., etc. My point was that grandparent poster was saying usage of home heating oil is supply-driven. I was saying it isn't, and you haven't contradicted that. When I have already taken all the energy-saving measures you list and more, and have gotten accustomed to that, then if the price drops or the supply increases I don't suddenly remove those measures and crank up the thermostat to 80. I continue on as I did and enjoy spending less with the oil dealer. So do my neighbors. But when the average daily temp runs about 20F for a month, I have to buy oil regardless of the price. Converting the heating plant to another fuel is simply not economical.
So the US taxpayers need to be spending $1billion/yr to subsidize peanuts? I don't buy that.
But a lot of the gasoline and home heating oil used in the country is very much a measure of how much is available.
Bullshit. I have to heat my house. My usage of home heating oil is purely a function of the average temperature. If it's cold, I have to buy about 250 gallons per month regardless of the price, or my family freezes. The argument that it's supply-dependent is absurd. If supply is greater or the price is lower I don't raise the thermostat or shower four times a day.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no. The part where I said "On a serious note" should have given that away. Show me where I argued against contingency planning. I'll bet I know as much about business continuity planning/disaster recovery planning as most of the people who are misreading my arguments here, and have written/rewritten my share of such plans.
The grandparent poster said he rebooted every server every Saturday, and came in every Sunday to fix the ones that didn't come up. My argument is that that does not add one bit to system (in the large sense) reliability, it is almost always done to compensate for cheap hardware or shitty *cough*Microsoft*cough* OS'es. Note his words, that he did this every weekend "instead of during the week when a reboot of a critical machine that did not work would be much worse." This does not describe a robust, high-availability system, it describes excuses for crap. You're absolutely right, that in a properly designed system with redundant equipment, hot spares, well-designed and -tested failover mechanisms and good management, you should be able to knock out any piece of equipment or any data path at any time without it causing a crisis. But that wasn't what the grandparent was describing. He was describing a set of systems where you spend every weekend rebooting everything because you'll shit your pants if you have a problem on a Wednesday. Well some of us don't have the luxury of that much downtime. So plan and test away. But every week is just wrong.
Why should it have to? If it's a critical server, your infrastructure should be such that it never power cycles. Our computer room has "power cycled" once since the facility was built in 1984. And that incident led to spending $65k in consulting engineering services alone, to determine why it happened and develop a plan to prevent it happening again. I'm not even sure what the expenditure in hardware or electrical contracting related to that was. I guess we define "critical" differently.
Yeah, sure, and it's a $1k item. This doesn't answer my question, which is why all the 15" LCD standalone monitors top out at 1024x768, when I have a 15" LCD panel in my laptop which runs at 1400x1050. I want the same (or similar) panel as a desktop monitor. But even the 17" monitors top out at a lower resolution than my laptop. That makes no sense.
And I have no trouble with resolution, my eyes, font sizes, or any application programs which don't know how to adjust.
Yeah, we had servers like that once, too. Ba-da-bing! Thanks, I'll be here all week.
On a serious note, am I the only one here who thinks a world in which no one questions a policy like that is insane? We've had critical, and I mean critical, servers that have uptimes measured in years. But then again they run NetWare, or OS/400, or MVS, or.... ABW.
Scheduled reboots are a part of good systems administration
Yeah, scheduled, as part of a disaster recovery test once a year, maybe. Weekly scheduled reboots are a sign of shitty systems. How often do you reboot your Cisco routers?
Actually, I do know how to count, thanks, and recognize the difference between fixed and recurring costs. My point is that the market has spoken, and the vast majority (of Americans, anyway) will go for short-term savings over long-term costs. (Look at almost any macroeconomic indicator.) Everyone here who's run more than 20 cartridges, let alone 100, through any inkjet printer, raise your hand. OK, I thought so.
If the number of Americans who actually understand the argument in favor of the $300 printer with $10 cartridges were significant, then the dollar would be a lot stronger, too.
The resolution thing is what I don't understand. I'm typing this on a Dell Latitude laptop, two years old, with what I think is a 15" LCD screen, running at 1400x1050 resolution. Yet in standalone LCD monitors, I have to go to 18-19" to get 1280x1024. Why is that? Why can't I get the LCD panel that's in this PC in a standalone model?
If I send you my e-mail address, can you send me your picture? I've never run across anyone with a triangular head before.
No, bye bye you. The model you present would require selling the printers for more than they cost to manufacture. The current model of HP and everyone else allows them to sell the printer for less than cost, because they make their money on the cartridges. That's why you can get a pretty good printer for well under $100US. Your model would require selling the same printer for at least double, and nobody (repeat, NOBODY) will buy it just because the standard is "open and free".
Nobody's going to buy Longhorn. They're going to buy a computer, which will have Longhorn on it whether they want it or not.
No, it's Lawn Guyland. There you stand on line.
Wrong.
" 'Professional journalist' shall mean one who, for gain or livelihood, is engaged in gathering, preparing, collecting, writing, editing, filming, taping or photographing of news intended for a newspaper, magazine, news agency, press association or wire service or other professional medium or agency which has as one of its regular functions the processing and researching of news intended for dissemination to the public; such person shall be someone performing said function either as a regular employee or as one otherwise professionally affiliated for gain or livelihood with such medium of communication." New York State Consolidated Laws, Article 7, Section 79-h (a)(6)
Wrong. " 'Professional journalist' shall mean one who, for gain or livelihood, is engaged in gathering, preparing, collecting, writing, editing, filming, taping or photographing of news intended for a newspaper, magazine, news agency, press association or wire service or other professional medium or agency which has as one of its regular functions the processing and researching of news intended for dissemination to the public; such person shall be someone performing said function either as a regular employee or as one otherwise professionally affiliated for gain or livelihood with such medium of communication." NY State Consolidated Laws, Art. 7, Sec. 79-h (a)(6)
The 31 states which have enacted a "shield law" would beg to differ with you.
Uh, no. Not unless the Legislative and Judicial branches merged while I was asleep last night. He may have chosen not to obey a judicial order, but he didn't break a law.
More and more, the answer is yes. Federal court judge Ernest Torres recently convicted Jim Taricani of the Providence, RI NBC affiliate station of criminal contempt for refusing to name a source. The only reason he didn't send him to jail is that the reporter is a heart transplant recipient who would be endangered by that, so he sentenced him to six months' house arrest instead. Taricani broke no law. Welcome to the new USA.
It was Robert Novak who outed Valerie Plame, not Judith Miller. Where's the outcry to send him to jail? Oh, that's right, he's a conservative, so there isn't any.
Helps if people know where the safe deposit box is. True story: years ago, my father had a friend who was a financial advisor, who believed strongly in gold. After the guy died suddenly, the wife frantically started calling everyone to see if they knew where the safe deposit box with the Krugerrands was. I don't know if she ever found it (the guy, whom I knew in passing, was paranoid enough that he could easily have pre-paid in cash for a box and left no record -- this was 20+ years ago, when you didn't have to provide fingerprints and a DNA sample to open a savings account.)
Not any more. Get used to it. This is the era of the decline and fall of the American empire. My recommendation to my kids is to learn Mandarin.
Just this afternoon, I looked at a completely ordinary photo in this month's IEEE Spectrum magazine about some new chip fab polishing method, which showed five engineers from Applied Materials responsible for it. Four of them were Asian. It's an American company now, but in another ten years they won't need even that.
Just a nit, but industrial design (which Apple have always been good at) is a technical issue. The fact that Apple has understood that has helped them to be profitable.
No, my point is that based on my admittedly anecdotal evidence, along with all other statistics I can find, as well as common sense, the vast majority of working musicians around the world, and probably a substantial majority in the USA, are not affected one way or another by more or less restrictive copyright laws. So the argument put forth by the RIAA and others that if we allow rampant copying of recorded material, music as an art form will effectively cease to exist, is bogus. If Sony/BMG/Warner/Vivendi/Universal/Whatever go out of business tomorrow, then it's probably bad for Britney Spears, but it is not the death of music. Every musician I know (and I know quite a few) will go on playing their music and making about the same $ as they made before.
You want to support musicians? Attend concerts. You want to support a marketing/PR industry? Buy CD's. Over-simplified, sure, but in the right general direction.
I'd argue that most do, either at their art, or at something else which allows them to execute their art in their "spare time". Modern IP laws and modern recording contracts exist largely to benefit the record companies and a VERY FEW "artists". I know many musicians, including my daughter, who make a living as musicians without having heard of the RIAA or ever having published a composition or recording. For comparison, I know zero musicians who have recording contracts with an RIAA-member company. I doubt I'm unique in this.
Given the price volatility of the last 2-3 years, very few dealers will do that any more, at least here in New England.
Been there, done that. Multiple heating zones, programmable thermostats, high-efficiency oil burner, etc., etc. My point was that grandparent poster was saying usage of home heating oil is supply-driven. I was saying it isn't, and you haven't contradicted that. When I have already taken all the energy-saving measures you list and more, and have gotten accustomed to that, then if the price drops or the supply increases I don't suddenly remove those measures and crank up the thermostat to 80. I continue on as I did and enjoy spending less with the oil dealer. So do my neighbors. But when the average daily temp runs about 20F for a month, I have to buy oil regardless of the price. Converting the heating plant to another fuel is simply not economical.
But a lot of the gasoline and home heating oil used in the country is very much a measure of how much is available.
Bullshit. I have to heat my house. My usage of home heating oil is purely a function of the average temperature. If it's cold, I have to buy about 250 gallons per month regardless of the price, or my family freezes. The argument that it's supply-dependent is absurd. If supply is greater or the price is lower I don't raise the thermostat or shower four times a day.
What is the alternate crop for sugar cane farmers, who are guaranteed by the USDA a price about 3x the world price?
That means we'd be dependent on foreign food only, which is so dangerous it's absurd
Relying on Brazilian sugar to make Coke is more dangerous than having our entire economy dependent on Middle Eastern oil?