1. Get $2 bills and dollar coins and use them for all their purchases for two weeks.
You forgot 50 cent pieces. A friend of mine & I tried this with a gang of guys in our office many years ago, but as we were only able to extend our project to about 5-6 people and maintain it for a few weeks, only the local businesses that everyone from our office frequented (i.e. the pub and the sushi place around the corner from the office) really noticed anything in their registers. We did manage to annoy the hell out of some poor unsuspecting immigrant workers at gas stations that had never seen a $2 bill before, though.
The largest impediment to the project was getting our hands on the odd-ball currency. Out of all branches of our bank in the area (The Chove, in Tyson's VA), only one regularly stocked $2 bills, and they only ever had $50 worth at any given time. After the 2nd or 3rd time people called their bank to order money and waited a couple of days to get it, the convenience of the cash machine won and our project was over.
Still, I imagine if a large enough percentage of a student body did this sort of thing, eventually newspaper reporters would pick up on it and run a story. Students have the kind of free time necessary to annoy their banker to order the crazy dosh and go pick it up, and their purchases tend to be in the range that a few $2 bills can take care of (a 3 course meal with drinks and coffee in a nice restaurant burns up your funny money really really fast).
All the technical points folks are making here are very important.
But the most important thing is the people managing the datacenter.
At least in Paris, about 4/5 of the catastrophic failures experienced in the last several years have been due to:
- the management being a bunch of slimy cheapos and not doing maintenance on time or cutting corners when they do get around to doing maintenance
- some cro-magnon "technician" from a maintenance contracting company doing something stupid because he was completely unsupervised
In all cases, these datacenters had everything that folks above have described: dual theoretically diverse utility power feeds, dual generators with big fuel tanks, big battery systems, dual theoretically diverse chiller circuits, etc etc etc.
The only thing you can do to protect yourself against this sort of thing is to treat the datacenter selection process, especially the salesbeasts, as a job interview. If you say something like "I don't care how big your generators are; show me proof that they've had an oil change sometime in the last two years, that you test them regulary, and that your emergency fuel delivery contract is paid up" and they bullshit you, it's time to look elsewhere.
The single most important thing for me is to find out what procedures they follow when a 3rd party contractor is on-site doing maintenance on their critical equipment, especially the power transfer systems. Power control master switches seem to have some sort of special attraction for morons. Outages experienced recently (all the fault of the unsupervised 3rd party maintenance technician):
- removing both utility feeds from the master control switch along with both of its own internal battery backups at the same time, so that it defaults into the fail-safe mode of "off"
- needing to transfer a PDU feed from one source to another and being alone, so he shuts off the primary feed before he walks over to the backup to enable it
- doing some kind of "test" of the redundancy settings and screwing things up enough that the datacenter power is running off house batteries, the generators do not kick on as they detect that the utility power is working, and the batteries are disconnected from utility power. 15 minutes later, all the batteries are flat and the datafloor power is dead. The house lights still work as they run off "dirty" power direct from the utility, and the cleaning people are running the vacuum.
- during a cooling system purge, leaving the drain valve for the cooling system open, with the fill valve for the reserve water tank shut, and the reservoir level alarm disabled, broken, or ignored. It took almost 24 hours to get the datafloor temp back to normal as the entire cooling system circuit was dry.
- some construction jackass lucky to still be alive drilling directly into the master B-feed power riser cables and getting God knows how many amps directly into his concrete drill. Every single individual breaker in all the B-feed PDUs on every floor popped. The worst bit was that the jackasses that run the place didn't have a master record of the breakers in each PDU (the data was just kept in the individual client records), so they started digging through all the client records one by one (also note the lack of someone that knows about SELECT FROM) to figure out who to turn back on until about 10 people ran into the DC manager's office screaming at them to turn everything on and sort out which ones they should turn back off later.
- a maintenance by a utility power technician causing the datacenter power system and the utility power system to have a somewhat different idea of what constitutes neutral voltage on a ground, again leading to the generator system thinking that the utility power was just fine but the battery system detecting a ground fault and refusing to us
Look at Cisco Catalyst 6500 power supplies and power-over-ethernet figures sometime. Current kills, and current also heats up. You just can't get enough watts out of a damn US mains plug at 110v to run a big switch with a ton of PoE ports on it, and even if you could you'd need a humongous cable to get it to the switch. At 110v you need 80+ amps to get the 9kw max power draw of a 13 slot chassis loaded with PoE cards. How many people here have even seen a 110v breaker that can handle more than 60 amps?
This is why all of Cisco's high-end Catalyst power supplies have two IEC connectors on them, and it says "use one for 230v, both for 110v" on the back. Probably also why their CRS-1 core packet heater was only available with high-voltage three-phase power supplies until they came out with the "small" one (only have the size of a nice fridge).
If the standard UK mains plug is so great, then why did an industrial designer have to come up with this innovation in order to make it fit into the same non-humongous form factor as plugs from other countries?
If they were using NSD like the RIPE does for K root, the zone compiler wouldn't have compiled the faulty zone file and the parser would have made noise about it. NSD is very hard to break as the zone files must be compiled into a database before loading. The parser simply refuses to compile when there are zones with errors in them, so the database it creates will never be bogus (similar to the way a compiler won't create an executable if the source code violates its rules).
Means Apple paid Intel to mangle it so it will not boot OS X.
No. Apple's EFI implementation has enough of their own tricks & tweaks that any other hardware EFI implementation will have a very hard time booting vanilla OS X. So much so that they had to release Boot Camp to get EFI Macs to boot Windows (even for versions of Windows that support EFI natively).
Is it any wonder that no EFI motherboards are on the market?
Let's just compare the performance, reliability, scalability, and security between Nominum's products and NSD and Unbound. For the moment, have a look specifically at Wouter's presentation from RIPE a year and a half ago for a beta version of Unbound, which show it handling double the number of queries per second of PowerDNS and Bind9 (start at page 11). We're now at version 1.3.3, and I've got an entry-level 1u Xeon server that will handle about 10kqps before slowing down with an Unbound config that took me all of an hour to learn, configure, and tune for optimum performance.
BTW, credit where credit is due, I've got to say thanks to Nominum for open-sourcing their DNS performance testing tools, which was what I used to test my Unbound setup. I think this marking campaign is a result of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, as PowerDNS et. al. were not created in a vacuum and certainly rely on open-source libraries for various things.
This is a troll? The cluefulness ratio here has gone down so far...
Let's just compare the performance, reliability, scalability, and security between Nominum's products and NSD and Unbound. For the moment, have a look specifically at Wouter's presentation from RIPE a year and a half ago for a beta version of Unbound, which show it handling double the number of queries per second of PowerDNS and Bind9 (start at page 11). We're now at version 1.3.3, and I've got an entry-level 1u Xeon server that will handle about 10kqps before slowing down with an Unbound config that took me all of an hour to learn, configure, and tune for optimum performance.
BTW, credit where credit is due, I've got to say thanks to Nominum for open-sourcing their DNS performance testing tools, which was what I used to test my Unbound setup. I think this marking campaign is a result of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, as PowerDNS et. al. were not created in a vacuum and certainly rely on open-source libraries for various things.
IPMI is your friend. You can mount ISOs on bare hardware, and remotely push the power button.
Oh, yeah, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie. IPMI is one of the most underrated, underreported technologies around. IPMI 2.0 on a cheap Dell R300 is even better than Sun's LOM, which I loved. Remote serial port to the motherboard over ethernet, including access to the BIOS. OS integration with a simple driver gives you watchdog functionality & the ability to send a software three-finger-salute before having to resort to using the virtual reset button. It's really one of those things that, once you get used to it, makes you realize that things really sucked before you had it. 90% of the users of these servers probably don't even realize they have this capability; it doesn't exactly jump out & scream at you, you have to know what it is and that it's there.
The solar panel, which produces 9 volts (18 watts) of energy, costs around $38 US to make from raw materials.
That is raging bullshit.
9V at 18 watts = 2 AMPS at 9 volts. The teenager is lying, the summary is lying, or whole thing is fake.
That doesn't seem that far off to me... The first link from googling "18w solar panel" gives this, a panel about the same size as the one in TFA, for $150. Looks like the Nepali kid just found a good way to make panels of about the same efficiency for a lot less cash by replacing the silicon with hair. Cool.
Whatever the word, it needs to convey the abandonment of fair play principles of competition and the selfish and callous disregard for others in the damage they cause. Anyone know of a word that describes this sort of behavior? Perhaps a few from psychology text books might well fit in here somewhere.
These are exactly the kind of problems that FloDesign set out to solve. Check out this video of how they get around the turbine size issue, as well as manufacturing and efficiency problems.
Sounds like you need Netdisco. It was originally designed to track assets on educational campus networks, and if your devices support a link-local discovery protocol (CDP, LLDP, FDP, etc) and SNMP than chances are they can be wrangled to work. It's complicated to install, but it's the best tool I've seen for really keeping track of a massive amount of devices on the network.
Drill into the side of a mountain or hill with a boring tool, leave the edges rough (with a smooth poured/paved floor for access) and just drop your server containers in there with power coming in.
Perhaps you were not aware that Belgium is flat as a crepe? Now, if they wanted to power the datacenter off the methane from the abundantly available cow and sheep poo, that would be something...
raid is for high availability, not backing up your data. Put another way, it's not *data* redundancy, it's *hardware* redundancy: it allows you to store one copy of your data on multiple devices. But it's still one single filesystem spread across those drives, and if you screw it up you're still fscked (pardon the pun).
JWZ (Netscape, DNA lounge) has a very simple guide on using rsync. rsync is really about all you need. Apple's Time Machine is based on it. Now, this guide is not eïxactly windows friendly, but 1) you stated that you only need to back up your data, not your apps, and 2) you sound like you're pretty technically adept so you're probably running cygwin on your windows boxes. Rsync should be able to handle this just fine on win32.
For data serenity, two separate single drives beats raid every time.
An auto switching power Y-cable with two inputs, and one output? ive never seen or heard of these.. Do you have a manufacturer or part number? id defiantly like some.
Well, it ain't just a Y cable and they're not super-cheap, but still affordable if you're running anything that needs anywhere near the level of redundancy that they provide.
It's called a static transfer switch and can be had for a few hundred bucks from most APC dealers (and MGE dealers, now that the merger is complete).
What's nice about them is that unlike a UPS, colo providers don't mind if you stick an STS in your rack, as a UPS removes the colo provider's ability to completely shut off everything in the datacenter with their automated power systems if the shit really hits the fan (trust me, if there's a fire in the datacenter, you'd much rather have your servers suffer a cold shutdown than sucking in smoke and FM200 and all the other tasty stuff in the air, not to mention fanning or even directly contributing to an electrical fire if it's in your rack). An STS still enables them to completely kill the juice in an emergency while providing good & economic redundancy for single-feed machines, not to mention being close to 100% efficient.
I think the scariest think about all this is the fact that the Lawful Intercept features that the Iranian national telecom and every other 3G operator on the planet have in their equipment areFEDERALLY MANDATED, and the legislators in question are obviously unaware of or blatantly ignoring this fact.
Not that this is news, but the right hand of the US Govt obviously has no f'ing clue what the left hand is doing. They obviously want some good PR by poo-pooing some companies that were doing business with Iran, and Nokia Siemens easily fell to hand. They didn't bother to do their homework, and now Nokia Siemens has a huge mess on their hands as a result of a lot of people with very loud voices being f'ing clueless about telecoms.
NEWS FLASH: IF YOU WANT TO CUT OFF THE FLOW OF MONEY TO THIS OPPRESSIVE ILLEGITIMATE IRANIAN SHAM GOVERNMENT, PUT PRESSURE ON THEIR CUSTOMERS TO BUY THEIR OIL AND GUNS ELSEWHERE OR FACE SANCTIONS
This is really basic stuff, and we've done it before. All their money comes from selling oil and weapons. Anyone messing with anything else is trying to make themselves look good for political reasons.
The BBC's article points out that a monitored system is better than no system, and that the Islamic Republic would certainly not have allowed mobile phones & internet to exist without such a system.
Listen:
Most large mobile phone networks (and internet networks) in western countries have a feature known as lawful intercept designed to allow law enforcement officials to monitor subscriber conversations. No vendor in their right mind would design gear without this feature as many nations' laws mandate its presence in public telecom networks.
In western nations, it's use requires a search warrant by law. Obviously, the hardware has no clue whether the operator has a warrant or not.
The only difference is that Khamenei doesn't give two shits about the warrant. But then, George Bush ordered the use of this exact same feature on AT&T and PacBell's networks without warrants as well, so what's the difference?
As you're a British subject, you will have 0 problems with residency, currency, or language. If you can handle living in a fairly small community (less than 100k residents on each island), Jersey and Guernsey have very very low taxes, more sunshine than anywhere in England, friendly people, and good food (they pride themselves on their agriculture) and . Most people are either into boating or aviation. There are tech jobs available as the islands are financial havens, and the financial industry needs geeks. If you need to go back to England for whatever reason, it's a short flight away. You can also hop over to France anytime and enjoy the Breton and Normand countryside.
Not after seeing what a piss poor job it did at actually preventing information leakage.
Thas a lot more to do with the technology's implementation than the technology itsself.
Network security training isn't exactly something the West has been exporting to the Islamic Republic's government in copius quantities. It's like the fighter pilots that defected after the revolution: most Iranian security professionals are intellectuals and want little to do with their government.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Get $2 bills and dollar coins and use them for all their purchases for two weeks.
You forgot 50 cent pieces. A friend of mine & I tried this with a gang of guys in our office many years ago, but as we were only able to extend our project to about 5-6 people and maintain it for a few weeks, only the local businesses that everyone from our office frequented (i.e. the pub and the sushi place around the corner from the office) really noticed anything in their registers. We did manage to annoy the hell out of some poor unsuspecting immigrant workers at gas stations that had never seen a $2 bill before, though.
The largest impediment to the project was getting our hands on the odd-ball currency. Out of all branches of our bank in the area (The Chove, in Tyson's VA), only one regularly stocked $2 bills, and they only ever had $50 worth at any given time. After the 2nd or 3rd time people called their bank to order money and waited a couple of days to get it, the convenience of the cash machine won and our project was over.
Still, I imagine if a large enough percentage of a student body did this sort of thing, eventually newspaper reporters would pick up on it and run a story. Students have the kind of free time necessary to annoy their banker to order the crazy dosh and go pick it up, and their purchases tend to be in the range that a few $2 bills can take care of (a 3 course meal with drinks and coffee in a nice restaurant burns up your funny money really really fast).
All the technical points folks are making here are very important.
But the most important thing is the people managing the datacenter.
At least in Paris, about 4/5 of the catastrophic failures experienced in the last several years have been due to:
- the management being a bunch of slimy cheapos and not doing maintenance on time or cutting corners when they do get around to doing maintenance
- some cro-magnon "technician" from a maintenance contracting company doing something stupid because he was completely unsupervised
In all cases, these datacenters had everything that folks above have described: dual theoretically diverse utility power feeds, dual generators with big fuel tanks, big battery systems, dual theoretically diverse chiller circuits, etc etc etc.
The only thing you can do to protect yourself against this sort of thing is to treat the datacenter selection process, especially the salesbeasts, as a job interview. If you say something like "I don't care how big your generators are; show me proof that they've had an oil change sometime in the last two years, that you test them regulary, and that your emergency fuel delivery contract is paid up" and they bullshit you, it's time to look elsewhere.
The single most important thing for me is to find out what procedures they follow when a 3rd party contractor is on-site doing maintenance on their critical equipment, especially the power transfer systems. Power control master switches seem to have some sort of special attraction for morons. Outages experienced recently (all the fault of the unsupervised 3rd party maintenance technician):
- removing both utility feeds from the master control switch along with both of its own internal battery backups at the same time, so that it defaults into the fail-safe mode of "off"
- needing to transfer a PDU feed from one source to another and being alone, so he shuts off the primary feed before he walks over to the backup to enable it
- doing some kind of "test" of the redundancy settings and screwing things up enough that the datacenter power is running off house batteries, the generators do not kick on as they detect that the utility power is working, and the batteries are disconnected from utility power. 15 minutes later, all the batteries are flat and the datafloor power is dead. The house lights still work as they run off "dirty" power direct from the utility, and the cleaning people are running the vacuum.
- during a cooling system purge, leaving the drain valve for the cooling system open, with the fill valve for the reserve water tank shut, and the reservoir level alarm disabled, broken, or ignored. It took almost 24 hours to get the datafloor temp back to normal as the entire cooling system circuit was dry.
- some construction jackass lucky to still be alive drilling directly into the master B-feed power riser cables and getting God knows how many amps directly into his concrete drill. Every single individual breaker in all the B-feed PDUs on every floor popped. The worst bit was that the jackasses that run the place didn't have a master record of the breakers in each PDU (the data was just kept in the individual client records), so they started digging through all the client records one by one (also note the lack of someone that knows about SELECT FROM) to figure out who to turn back on until about 10 people ran into the DC manager's office screaming at them to turn everything on and sort out which ones they should turn back off later.
- a maintenance by a utility power technician causing the datacenter power system and the utility power system to have a somewhat different idea of what constitutes neutral voltage on a ground, again leading to the generator system thinking that the utility power was just fine but the battery system detecting a ground fault and refusing to us
if you drive a nail through a wire, it will only be carrying 15, maybe 20A before the circuit breaker blows. That's opposed to the 220V at 40A...
At least in France, the current 230v household breaker norms are:
- 10A for lighting circuits
- 16A for normal outlets
- 20A and 32A for kitchen stuff, water heaters, etc.
Which is pretty much what the current ratings on household stuff in the US are, give or take.
Personally I can't tell the difference between being hit with 110v and 230v. They both shock the crap out of you.
mod parent up
Look at Cisco Catalyst 6500 power supplies and power-over-ethernet figures sometime. Current kills, and current also heats up. You just can't get enough watts out of a damn US mains plug at 110v to run a big switch with a ton of PoE ports on it, and even if you could you'd need a humongous cable to get it to the switch. At 110v you need 80+ amps to get the 9kw max power draw of a 13 slot chassis loaded with PoE cards. How many people here have even seen a 110v breaker that can handle more than 60 amps?
This is why all of Cisco's high-end Catalyst power supplies have two IEC connectors on them, and it says "use one for 230v, both for 110v" on the back. Probably also why their CRS-1 core packet heater was only available with high-voltage three-phase power supplies until they came out with the "small" one (only have the size of a nice fridge).
If the standard UK mains plug is so great, then why did an industrial designer have to come up with this innovation in order to make it fit into the same non-humongous form factor as plugs from other countries?
If they wouldn't license it to Dell, then they won't license it to you. Not as long as Steve is the boss.
mod parent up. the pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handle.
If they were using NSD like the RIPE does for K root, the zone compiler wouldn't have compiled the faulty zone file and the parser would have made noise about it. NSD is very hard to break as the zone files must be compiled into a database before loading. The parser simply refuses to compile when there are zones with errors in them, so the database it creates will never be bogus (similar to the way a compiler won't create an executable if the source code violates its rules).
Hear hear. If distinguished physicist Stephen Hawking had been born in a country with UK style socialized education, he'd be digging ditches today.
Because in the UK they somehow have therapy/treatment for his paralysis?
Means Apple paid Intel to mangle it so it will not boot OS X.
No. Apple's EFI implementation has enough of their own tricks & tweaks that any other hardware EFI implementation will have a very hard time booting vanilla OS X. So much so that they had to release Boot Camp to get EFI Macs to boot Windows (even for versions of Windows that support EFI natively).
Is it any wonder that no EFI motherboards are on the market?
You mean like this one?
Let's just compare the performance, reliability, scalability, and security between Nominum's products and NSD and Unbound. For the moment, have a look specifically at Wouter's presentation from RIPE a year and a half ago for a beta version of Unbound, which show it handling double the number of queries per second of PowerDNS and Bind9 (start at page 11). We're now at version 1.3.3, and I've got an entry-level 1u Xeon server that will handle about 10kqps before slowing down with an Unbound config that took me all of an hour to learn, configure, and tune for optimum performance.
BTW, credit where credit is due, I've got to say thanks to Nominum for open-sourcing their DNS performance testing tools, which was what I used to test my Unbound setup. I think this marking campaign is a result of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, as PowerDNS et. al. were not created in a vacuum and certainly rely on open-source libraries for various things.
This is a troll? The cluefulness ratio here has gone down so far...
Let's just compare the performance, reliability, scalability, and security between Nominum's products and NSD and Unbound. For the moment, have a look specifically at Wouter's presentation from RIPE a year and a half ago for a beta version of Unbound, which show it handling double the number of queries per second of PowerDNS and Bind9 (start at page 11). We're now at version 1.3.3, and I've got an entry-level 1u Xeon server that will handle about 10kqps before slowing down with an Unbound config that took me all of an hour to learn, configure, and tune for optimum performance.
BTW, credit where credit is due, I've got to say thanks to Nominum for open-sourcing their DNS performance testing tools, which was what I used to test my Unbound setup. I think this marking campaign is a result of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, as PowerDNS et. al. were not created in a vacuum and certainly rely on open-source libraries for various things.
IPMI is your friend. You can mount ISOs on bare hardware, and remotely push the power button.
Oh, yeah, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie. IPMI is one of the most underrated, underreported technologies around. IPMI 2.0 on a cheap Dell R300 is even better than Sun's LOM, which I loved. Remote serial port to the motherboard over ethernet, including access to the BIOS. OS integration with a simple driver gives you watchdog functionality & the ability to send a software three-finger-salute before having to resort to using the virtual reset button. It's really one of those things that, once you get used to it, makes you realize that things really sucked before you had it. 90% of the users of these servers probably don't even realize they have this capability; it doesn't exactly jump out & scream at you, you have to know what it is and that it's there.
The solar panel, which produces 9 volts (18 watts) of energy, costs around $38 US to make from raw materials.
That is raging bullshit.
9V at 18 watts = 2 AMPS at 9 volts. The teenager is lying, the summary is lying, or whole thing is fake.
That doesn't seem that far off to me... The first link from googling "18w solar panel" gives this, a panel about the same size as the one in TFA, for $150. Looks like the Nepali kid just found a good way to make panels of about the same efficiency for a lot less cash by replacing the silicon with hair. Cool.
Whatever the word, it needs to convey the abandonment of fair play principles of competition and the selfish and callous disregard for others in the damage they cause. Anyone know of a word that describes this sort of behavior? Perhaps a few from psychology text books might well fit in here somewhere.
How about Machiavellian?
These are exactly the kind of problems that FloDesign set out to solve. Check out this video of how they get around the turbine size issue, as well as manufacturing and efficiency problems.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RagPPrHUMTY
Sounds like you need Netdisco. It was originally designed to track assets on educational campus networks, and if your devices support a link-local discovery protocol (CDP, LLDP, FDP, etc) and SNMP than chances are they can be wrangled to work. It's complicated to install, but it's the best tool I've seen for really keeping track of a massive amount of devices on the network.
Drill into the side of a mountain or hill with a boring tool, leave the edges rough (with a smooth poured/paved floor for access) and just drop your server containers in there with power coming in.
Perhaps you were not aware that Belgium is flat as a crepe? Now, if they wanted to power the datacenter off the methane from the abundantly available cow and sheep poo, that would be something...
raid is for high availability, not backing up your data. Put another way, it's not *data* redundancy, it's *hardware* redundancy: it allows you to store one copy of your data on multiple devices. But it's still one single filesystem spread across those drives, and if you screw it up you're still fscked (pardon the pun).
JWZ (Netscape, DNA lounge) has a very simple guide on using rsync. rsync is really about all you need. Apple's Time Machine is based on it. Now, this guide is not eïxactly windows friendly, but 1) you stated that you only need to back up your data, not your apps, and 2) you sound like you're pretty technically adept so you're probably running cygwin on your windows boxes. Rsync should be able to handle this just fine on win32.
For data serenity, two separate single drives beats raid every time.
An auto switching power Y-cable with two inputs, and one output? ive never seen or heard of these.. Do you have a manufacturer or part number?
id defiantly like some.
Well, it ain't just a Y cable and they're not super-cheap, but still affordable if you're running anything that needs anywhere near the level of redundancy that they provide.
It's called a static transfer switch and can be had for a few hundred bucks from most APC dealers (and MGE dealers, now that the merger is complete).
What's nice about them is that unlike a UPS, colo providers don't mind if you stick an STS in your rack, as a UPS removes the colo provider's ability to completely shut off everything in the datacenter with their automated power systems if the shit really hits the fan (trust me, if there's a fire in the datacenter, you'd much rather have your servers suffer a cold shutdown than sucking in smoke and FM200 and all the other tasty stuff in the air, not to mention fanning or even directly contributing to an electrical fire if it's in your rack). An STS still enables them to completely kill the juice in an emergency while providing good & economic redundancy for single-feed machines, not to mention being close to 100% efficient.
didn't stand a chance against a slashdotting...
I think the scariest think about all this is the fact that the Lawful Intercept features that the Iranian national telecom and every other 3G operator on the planet have in their equipment areFEDERALLY MANDATED, and the legislators in question are obviously unaware of or blatantly ignoring this fact.
Not that this is news, but the right hand of the US Govt obviously has no f'ing clue what the left hand is doing. They obviously want some good PR by poo-pooing some companies that were doing business with Iran, and Nokia Siemens easily fell to hand. They didn't bother to do their homework, and now Nokia Siemens has a huge mess on their hands as a result of a lot of people with very loud voices being f'ing clueless about telecoms.
NEWS FLASH: IF YOU WANT TO CUT OFF THE FLOW OF MONEY TO THIS OPPRESSIVE ILLEGITIMATE IRANIAN SHAM GOVERNMENT, PUT PRESSURE ON THEIR CUSTOMERS TO BUY THEIR OIL AND GUNS ELSEWHERE OR FACE SANCTIONS
This is really basic stuff, and we've done it before. All their money comes from selling oil and weapons. Anyone messing with anything else is trying to make themselves look good for political reasons.
This BBC article is very good:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8112550.stm
The BBC's article points out that a monitored system is better than no system, and that the Islamic Republic would certainly not have allowed mobile phones & internet to exist without such a system.
Listen:
Most large mobile phone networks (and internet networks) in western countries have a feature known as lawful intercept designed to allow law enforcement officials to monitor subscriber conversations. No vendor in their right mind would design gear without this feature as many nations' laws mandate its presence in public telecom networks.
In western nations, it's use requires a search warrant by law. Obviously, the hardware has no clue whether the operator has a warrant or not.
The only difference is that Khamenei doesn't give two shits about the warrant. But then, George Bush ordered the use of this exact same feature on AT&T and PacBell's networks without warrants as well, so what's the difference?
As you're a British subject, you will have 0 problems with residency, currency, or language. If you can handle living in a fairly small community (less than 100k residents on each island), Jersey and Guernsey have very very low taxes, more sunshine than anywhere in England, friendly people, and good food (they pride themselves on their agriculture) and . Most people are either into boating or aviation. There are tech jobs available as the islands are financial havens, and the financial industry needs geeks. If you need to go back to England for whatever reason, it's a short flight away. You can also hop over to France anytime and enjoy the Breton and Normand countryside.
Not after seeing what a piss poor job it did at actually preventing information leakage.
Thas a lot more to do with the technology's implementation than the technology itsself.
Network security training isn't exactly something the West has been exporting to the Islamic Republic's government in copius quantities. It's like the fighter pilots that defected after the revolution: most Iranian security professionals are intellectuals and want little to do with their government.