The way I see it, different countries need different forms of aid when disasters like this happen. Cash to purchase basic necessities is most useful in poorer areas like SE Asia.
If there were a similar disaster in the States, throwing cash at the problem would be somewhat redundant.
I recall after 9/11, Australia sent firefighters to back-fill for their American colleagues who had left their own areas to help in NYC.
The fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from you body weight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt.
Um, it's Christmas, lots of people from all over the world are holidaying in these areas. Worried families at home want to hear this kind of information.
Yes we get an Asian CNN here in Australia which has been covering this continually. Also BBC World and Sky Australia (which switches to Sky UK overnight).
Last night the only network that WASN'T covering this here was Fox, which we get straight from the US. But it was probably 4AM in the US at that time and they were showing O'Really reruns.
Indeed. IBM have been writing Redbooks for years. They get people who are already familiar with the subject matter (such as sysadmins), lock them in a lab in California with the relevant equipment for a couple of months, and let them play and write a book about what they find.
Redbooks are a fantastic resource. I wish more vendors did the same.
I have seen Linux displacing other O/S'es for consolidation purposes, and usually Linux itself is not the driving factor.
For example, VMWare/ESX is gaining a lot of market consolidating hundreds of Windows servers (usually test/dev) down to a dozen or so Intel servers running VMWare/ESX, which is Redhat Linux running VMWare. But the Linux side of it is almost invisible. I have spoken to VMWare administrators who refused to believe that it was running on Linux.
Also, I've seen large Oracle databases moved from Sun or HP hardware, to IBM Intel servers running Oracle RAC on Redhat. In that case, Oracle and Intel platform are the driving factors. Again, the Linux is packaged sepecfically to run Oracle RAC, so server administration is minimal.
My point is that, in my somewhat limited experience, people are not purposely moving to Linux, it's more that vendors are packaging their products that way, and it makes sense in many cases.
Although I can't find a link now, this reminds me of a concept I read IBM touting a couple of years ago.
Aimed more at the "enterprise space", this article talked about cube shaped modules or nodes, with an I/O interface on each of it's six sides.
These nodes would each snap together to form a larger array, like Lego bricks. Each node would have an specific purpose, such as processor node, or data storage node, or whatever else may be required. Every node could communicate with every other node.
Managing a data centre would become like growing a biological organism as the system expanded. You would add new nodes to the "front" so the system would move around the computer room floor. Old dead or redundant nodes would emerge from the back.
I don't know how they planned to deal with latency across the nodes as the system grows, but still a fascinating concept.
I agree with you, and I guess that's why I like his stuff. I'm the same age as him. I understand all of his references and jokes. I feel I can relate to him.
I really don't get much out of the cruder side of his humour. Like the sh!t monster, and Jay's ramblings, but I can forgive it because that kind of humour just reminds me of some of my mates.
Yeah, Larry Niven's books taught me, or rather made me properly grasp the concept, that interstellar travel would require long period of acceleration towards your target, then the same period of deceleration, or acceleration away from the target.
I started working as a mainframe operator for a financial company in 1990.
At home around that time, I had a 486/DX33 with 1 MB of RAM and a 256MB hard disk.
At work, we had a data centre full of these refrigerator sized IBM 3390-1 disk boxes that held a massive 1GB. These were slowly being replaced by the new 3390-3 (er, 3GB). I *think* a single drive was about $US30,000. We bought them in strings of 8 or 16 or more.
Tape was cheap and plentiful at $100 for a 200MB tape. The place I worked at had a library of 70,000 active tapes.
I'm trying to remember my Apple//e crashing. Didn't it crash out to the "monitor" occasionally, where I think you could screw around with the contents of memory and registers.
After that I had an Amiga 500. Spent a lot of time looking at the "Guru Meditation" crash screen.
I'm Australian. I like having the option to tip someone working a relatively low-paid job if they've looked after me more than they need to. I always tip in restaurants unless the waiting staff were *bad*.
What annoys me is seeing a "sur-charge" added onto the bill. If that's the service charge, what's the rest of the bill for?
In Australia (though I am not an accountant, and this may have changed since last I looked into it) the tax is based on the dollar amount, ignoring the cents, so you could get 99c untaxed by charging $X.99 rather than $X+1.
I think that's wrong. I believe the cents are counted.
Agreed.
But it's a bit like the invention of nuclear weaponry. They've been invented now; there's no turning back. Even if we manage to disassemble every single bomb (shutdown every tracker), we already know the concept, so someone, somewhere, will create another even better bomb (better p2p system).
I love the theory behind Bittorrent. The concept and it's potential uses (video on demand, distributed file systems...) make my tiny mind spin.
I have a feeling that lately it is the boys who cry wolf that are taking over geekdom
I agree.
I stopped reading this particular article when he described himself as "well regarded as one of the top civil rights advocates in cyberspace".
And I have to agree with those who are saying, if you are worried about privacy for your email, you shouldn't be using a public email server like gmail/yahoo mail/hotmail/msn mail.. etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The 1084S monitor? I did that too, years ago. It was fantastic at the time. I think Philips actually manufactured those monitors.
The way I see it, different countries need different forms of aid when disasters like this happen. Cash to purchase basic necessities is most useful in poorer areas like SE Asia.
If there were a similar disaster in the States, throwing cash at the problem would be somewhat redundant.
I recall after 9/11, Australia sent firefighters to back-fill for their American colleagues who had left their own areas to help in NYC.
The fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from you body weight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt.
RIP Douglas Adams.
I think my brain just wobbled.
Um, it's Christmas, lots of people from all over the world are holidaying in these areas. Worried families at home want to hear this kind of information.
Yes we get an Asian CNN here in Australia which has been covering this continually. Also BBC World and Sky Australia (which switches to Sky UK overnight).
Last night the only network that WASN'T covering this here was Fox, which we get straight from the US. But it was probably 4AM in the US at that time and they were showing O'Really reruns.
Indeed. IBM have been writing Redbooks for years. They get people who are already familiar with the subject matter (such as sysadmins), lock them in a lab in California with the relevant equipment for a couple of months, and let them play and write a book about what they find.
;)
Redbooks are a fantastic resource. I wish more vendors did the same.
And lots of fun to write
ah, for a mod point.
I have seen Linux displacing other O/S'es for consolidation purposes, and usually Linux itself is not the driving factor.
For example, VMWare/ESX is gaining a lot of market consolidating hundreds of Windows servers (usually test/dev) down to a dozen or so Intel servers running VMWare/ESX, which is Redhat Linux running VMWare. But the Linux side of it is almost invisible. I have spoken to VMWare administrators who refused to believe that it was running on Linux.
Also, I've seen large Oracle databases moved from Sun or HP hardware, to IBM Intel servers running Oracle RAC on Redhat. In that case, Oracle and Intel platform are the driving factors. Again, the Linux is packaged sepecfically to run Oracle RAC, so server administration is minimal.
My point is that, in my somewhat limited experience, people are not purposely moving to Linux, it's more that vendors are packaging their products that way, and it makes sense in many cases.
Although I can't find a link now, this reminds me of a concept I read IBM touting a couple of years ago.
Aimed more at the "enterprise space", this article talked about cube shaped modules or nodes, with an I/O interface on each of it's six sides.
These nodes would each snap together to form a larger array, like Lego bricks. Each node would have an specific purpose, such as processor node, or data storage node, or whatever else may be required. Every node could communicate with every other node.
Managing a data centre would become like growing a biological organism as the system expanded. You would add new nodes to the "front" so the system would move around the computer room floor. Old dead or redundant nodes would emerge from the back.
I don't know how they planned to deal with latency across the nodes as the system grows, but still a fascinating concept.
I agree with you, and I guess that's why I like his stuff. I'm the same age as him. I understand all of his references and jokes. I feel I can relate to him.
I really don't get much out of the cruder side of his humour. Like the sh!t monster, and Jay's ramblings, but I can forgive it because that kind of humour just reminds me of some of my mates.
Maybe he's made other good movies
Happy Gilmore.
Vote parent +1 Insightful
Yeah, Larry Niven's books taught me, or rather made me properly grasp the concept, that interstellar travel would require long period of acceleration towards your target, then the same period of deceleration, or acceleration away from the target.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I just had to add that I was very happy when the robotic tape libraries arrived!
I started working as a mainframe operator for a financial company in 1990.
At home around that time, I had a 486/DX33 with 1 MB of RAM and a 256MB hard disk.
At work, we had a data centre full of these refrigerator sized IBM 3390-1 disk boxes that held a massive 1GB. These were slowly being replaced by the new 3390-3 (er, 3GB). I *think* a single drive was about $US30,000. We bought them in strings of 8 or 16 or more.
Tape was cheap and plentiful at $100 for a 200MB tape. The place I worked at had a library of 70,000 active tapes.
I'm trying to remember my Apple //e crashing. Didn't it crash out to the "monitor" occasionally, where I think you could screw around with the contents of memory and registers.
After that I had an Amiga 500. Spent a lot of time looking at the "Guru Meditation" crash screen.
That's a lot of empty disk.
The storage administrator I once was is screaming "Give it back! Wasting money!"
I'm Australian. I like having the option to tip someone working a relatively low-paid job if they've looked after me more than they need to. I always tip in restaurants unless the waiting staff were *bad*. What annoys me is seeing a "sur-charge" added onto the bill. If that's the service charge, what's the rest of the bill for?
I think that's wrong. I believe the cents are counted.
Agreed. But it's a bit like the invention of nuclear weaponry. They've been invented now; there's no turning back. Even if we manage to disassemble every single bomb (shutdown every tracker), we already know the concept, so someone, somewhere, will create another even better bomb (better p2p system). I love the theory behind Bittorrent. The concept and it's potential uses (video on demand, distributed file systems...) make my tiny mind spin.
Um, I would say "14th of May, 2004", unless I'm talking to American colleagues.
Google cannot guarantee the permenant deletion of mail. Why can't they?
Maybe they're doing a good job of backing up their email servers.
Deleting a 10KB email from disk is easy. Deleting a copy of it from a tape, mixed in with 10 million other mail files, is a pain in the you-know-what.
And they might/should have multiple backups of that email you just deleted on different tapes, maybe even in different physical locations.
If you have an effective backup regime, permanently deleting every copy of a single piece of data can be a daunting task !
//JOB ....
//SYSUT2 DD DISP=(NEW,CATLG),DSN=NEW.DISK.DATASET,UNIT=DASD
//STEP01 EXEC PGM=IEBGENER
//SYSUT1 DD DISP=(OLD,DELETE),DSN=OLD.TAPE.DATASET,UNIT=TAPE