I've always been amazed that tape is trusted as much as it is. It seem (anecdotally at least) to have a disproportionately high failure rate.
I'm not sure that's the problem so much - after all, LTO has a read head positioned directly after the write head and automatically verifies as it goes along. A tape error is dead easy to spot.
There are a number of places where things can fall apart, and tapes don't even need to come into the matter:
Nobody checking the logs
Failure to understand the processes necessary to get a good backup. (You can't just dump the files that comprise a database to disk - you must either quiesce the database or use the DBMS' inbuilt backup routine - or you will wind up with inconsistent files and hence an inconsistent database. You'd be amazed how many people don't understand this.)
Failure to maintain backup processes. (When you moved the database to another disk because you were running out of space, you did update your backup process? Right?)
Not doing any test restores.
Not doing enough test restores, or doing them carefully enough. (If you're unlucky, your database will come back up OK even though you didn't quiesce it before carrying out the backup. Why do I say unlucky? Well, if it had not come up OK, you'd know immediately that there was a problem with your process. Then once the database is back up, make sure you check the restored data to ensure that recent transactions which should be on the backup actually are).
Microsoft have been working with the Samba folks for some time. I suspect this is more to shut the EU up than because they really want to, but if that's their purpose then starting to enforce patents against the Samba team would almost certainly be a most efficient foot-shooting exercise.
If I am being perfectly honest, the only frustration (and I'm sure it's got more to do with a lack of resources than a lack of talent - Samba probably needs about four times as many developers who know the protocol backwards and inside out, problem is most of them probably work for Microsoft) is the glacial speed this is all moving at. AD was introduced with Windows 2000, the Samba team have been working on getting Samba 4 out for years and it's still only alpha code. Frankly, only being able to provide something equivalent to an NT4 domain looked quaint four years ago. Today it's downright embarrassing for anyone claiming that F/OSS is functionally equivalent to Active Directory.
(note to F/OSS advocacy trolls: I am well aware that AD is little more than LDAP/Kerberos under the hood. When you compose your flames, perhaps you would be so good as to explain exactly how one can manage a network full of Windows workstations with the level of control AD policies offer using nothing but F/OSS software which has reached a reasonable level of stability. NT4 policies are a pretty lousy substitute.)
Not to b too harsh, but this is not true - nobody complains when I send them a.doc that was created with OO (though I keep the original in.odt format).
Which is why when it became clear that we were going to get so many seemingly-reasonable requests for MS office there was no point in limiting it, my suggestion was to not license MS Office at all for anyone unless and until they regularly found themselves meeting interoperability issues.
The same mindset that would have allowed for open source would have allowed for other "breaking the government waste" pattern activities.
Why buy and maintain MS-Office licenses when there's a better, free, alternative? Teh "Because..." mentality.
I'm having exactly this conversation at work right now - and the economic climate means it's a much easier conversation for me than it was 2 years ago. However, it goes something like this:
Me: Yes, could roll out Open Office to everyone. No problem. And it's free. PHB: Good, so what do we need to consider in terms of compatibility? Me: You'll see 95-98% MS Office compatibility easily. Of course, if you want 99-100% compatibility with MS Office, it's going to have to be MS Office. This is true for all office suites - hell, it's true between different versions of Office. PHB: Right, so anyone who deals with outside organisations on a regular basis needs MS Office. Me: Well, you could exchange PDFs... PHB: Anyone who deals with outside organisations on a regular basis needs MS Office. Who else? Me: Okay.... well, you need to consider if less than 100% compatibility with existing files is a problem. Things like spreadsheets, big fancy documents... PHB: Spreadsheets? OK, so the finance people need MS Office. Any others? Me: Well, engineering say that having to deal with different formats internally will be a PITA... PHB: So we get MS Office for the engineers.... Me: Right, you do realise that there's only one license being saved now?
Most people don't use "value for money" when they're deciding who to vote for.
They might use "lowest taxes", or they might use "best services" as criteria (and hence it's these things that politicians tend to cater for in their campaigns) but it is most unusual for a party to assume power on a platform of "We've done some research and we're pretty sure we can provide far more efficient services and deliver tax cuts into the bargain".
Watch "Yes, minister" for an idea as to why this may be the case....
Mostly they want it in Word so they can remove your contact info and add theirs. It prevents the client company from screwing them over by contacting you directly. Which seems pretty reasonable. Unfortunately they are usually extremely careless so my beautifully formatted resume becomes an unreadable mess in the process.
They seldom accept a CV in another format (eg. PDF) with contact info removed, however. So I don't believe that for one second.
I am told the main reason for them being in word is their database will only index word documents.
Considering this bank openly admits that they can see all the information on their screen as soon as they've got your account details and they just make up a security question on the spot based on those details, I'd say that's a dangerous assumption.
Another bank I know, the computer makes up the security questions and the person in the call centre just relays them and keys in the answer the customer gives. Too many wrong answers, and computer says no.
See Isaac Asimov for the exact quote, but it basically says robots may not harm humans. Because the law is encoded *in the hardware* there's no way that it can be altered.
Very noble, very pure, very useless when your robot doesn't have any intelligence and just executes commands blindly.
The internet banking system gives access to account history without requiring a token, which means the last step of the authentication when telephone banking becomes trivial to overcome. But at the same time, I can think of plenty of good reasons why I wouldn't want my account history to get into anyone else's hands - not least of which is it's none of their business.
In many, however, it is the exception rather than the rule. My bank's just issued me a security token (yay!) but they, er, don't use it for the logon process. They only use it for transferring money out of the account.
Which is well and good but the telephone banking system quite often relies on a question like "Can you name a recent transaction on your account please?".
It was published in a British journal - though I don't know where the research took place - and HFCS is quite unusual in most of the EU so it may not be that.
Though glucose syrup is certainly ubiquitous in sweet things sold in the UK and is apparently normally made from corn or wheat, it doesn't have a particularly high fructose content.
You don't even need the notice; every bloody thing you write is copyrighted unless explicitly released into the public domain. That's one of the many screwed-up things about US copyright law; you can have copyrighted material which gives you no indication as to who owns the copyright, let alone how to contact them.
You don't in the UK either, but it's generally advised that you do put a copyright notice on because it's effectively a big sign saying "This is my work. I know my rights", which will immediately eliminate the (admittedly somewhat flimsy) defence of "How was I to know it was under copyright?"
I don't normally reply to AC's, and I'm sure I'll get modded downward for this, but this is actually one of the good things about the DMCA (which wouldn't have applied here because it's a British artist and therefore almost certainly the UK arm of Warner Music).
AIUI, the DMCA allows the person whose website/blog/whatever is taken down to write to the service provider basically saying "They don't have copyright. Please reinstate the site. I'll take any consequences" and as soon as they do that, the provider is absolved of any responsibility. No need to go to court to resolve the issue, this mechanism is actually written into the law. Such a law doesn't exist in the UK.
AIUI, the DMCA does allow for people whose work is wrongly yanked to write a letter back basically saying "It's mine, I own the copyright and will take responsibility for any consequences" and it should go back up.
But I would point out one big hairy issue here - Edwyn Collins is Scottish. Any agreement he'd have had with Warner was most likely with Warner UK, not Warner USA. So the DMCA wouldn't have been used here.
Communication skills are overrated. Those people that are willing to listen always get the message. It's only when people are too deeply entrenched in their own way of thinking that communication skills are really valuable. Most ideas are simple anyway and if well understood, then they can be easily transmitted.
Oh boy.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you're either relatively young (probably not much older than 25), you've been fantastically lucky or both.
The world (particularly where specialist knowledge is concerned) is absolutely chock-full of people who have the knowledge down to a fine art and can apply it all day every day beautifully.
The number of people who truly understand it and are able to communicate it in clear, layman's terms is drastically lower.
I find a certain delicious irony in noting that you were able to explain your point of view beautifully. To me, this suggests that you're not the kind of person that would find communication to be a big problem in the first place.
How about Isaac Newton? Neurotic, no communications skills, died a virgin.
Paul Erdos? Maybe the greatest mathematician ever but no life skills at all.
etc.
Which is great for them. Really, it is.
But let's be honest, if you're reading this you are not the next Isaac Newton. And you never will be.
That kind of ability comes about a couple of times in a generation. If you (or anyone) is going to be part of some fantastic discovery which will change the world, the immense likelihood is that you'll be making that discovery as part of a team effort. Which requires communication.
Find someone who CAN do that, and have them do so, for a cut of the result.
Different people are good at different things. Why is communication so highly valued in areas where it is not essential?
Probably because in order to get your team to do what you want them to do (rather than a poorly-conceived misunderstanding of what you want them to do) requires communication.
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.
Not necessarily. 500 words is actually very little. If you want to get a couple of points across in 500 words, it forces you to write clearly and concisely - and having seen some of the dross written by supposedly educated people, "ability to write clearly and concisely" is definitely something to be encouraged.
Can we agree that a 10 year old mac would be one released around Q4 1999?
If this page is accurate, the iMac G3/400 was released on October 4 1999. Which would meet the minimum specs for OS X 10.4, albeit only just. Had you pushed the boat out and bought a PowerMac, you'd have a processor with a similar raw clock speed only it'd be a G4 rather than a G3.
Now, according to mozilla.org, Firefox 3.5 requires OS X 10.4.
Of course, this is taking things to an extreme because few people would consider a 10-year old computer to offer a great deal of useful life, but to claim that PCs have a 2.5x longer support life is just downright lying.
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I've always been amazed that tape is trusted as much as it is. It seem (anecdotally at least) to have a disproportionately high failure rate.
I'm not sure that's the problem so much - after all, LTO has a read head positioned directly after the write head and automatically verifies as it goes along. A tape error is dead easy to spot.
There are a number of places where things can fall apart, and tapes don't even need to come into the matter:
Seems like those off-site incremental storage firms could dispatch a station wagon full of tapes, for enough money.
Some of them do, for exactly that reason. MozyPro, for one.
Hopefully, SAMBA4 will really be headache free.
I believe that is the general idea - AIUI the plan is to replicate AD domain controlling/file/printserving with 100% compatibility.
Whether or not it's achievable this side of 2011 I don't know.
Microsoft have been working with the Samba folks for some time. I suspect this is more to shut the EU up than because they really want to, but if that's their purpose then starting to enforce patents against the Samba team would almost certainly be a most efficient foot-shooting exercise.
If I am being perfectly honest, the only frustration (and I'm sure it's got more to do with a lack of resources than a lack of talent - Samba probably needs about four times as many developers who know the protocol backwards and inside out, problem is most of them probably work for Microsoft) is the glacial speed this is all moving at. AD was introduced with Windows 2000, the Samba team have been working on getting Samba 4 out for years and it's still only alpha code. Frankly, only being able to provide something equivalent to an NT4 domain looked quaint four years ago. Today it's downright embarrassing for anyone claiming that F/OSS is functionally equivalent to Active Directory.
(note to F/OSS advocacy trolls: I am well aware that AD is little more than LDAP/Kerberos under the hood. When you compose your flames, perhaps you would be so good as to explain exactly how one can manage a network full of Windows workstations with the level of control AD policies offer using nothing but F/OSS software which has reached a reasonable level of stability. NT4 policies are a pretty lousy substitute.)
Not to b too harsh, but this is not true - nobody complains when I send them a .doc that was created with OO (though I keep the original in .odt format).
Which is why when it became clear that we were going to get so many seemingly-reasonable requests for MS office there was no point in limiting it, my suggestion was to not license MS Office at all for anyone unless and until they regularly found themselves meeting interoperability issues.
The same mindset that would have allowed for open source would have allowed for other "breaking the government waste" pattern activities.
Why buy and maintain MS-Office licenses when there's a better, free, alternative? Teh "Because ..." mentality.
I'm having exactly this conversation at work right now - and the economic climate means it's a much easier conversation for me than it was 2 years ago. However, it goes something like this:
Me: Yes, could roll out Open Office to everyone. No problem. And it's free.
PHB: Good, so what do we need to consider in terms of compatibility?
Me: You'll see 95-98% MS Office compatibility easily. Of course, if you want 99-100% compatibility with MS Office, it's going to have to be MS Office. This is true for all office suites - hell, it's true between different versions of Office.
PHB: Right, so anyone who deals with outside organisations on a regular basis needs MS Office.
Me: Well, you could exchange PDFs...
PHB: Anyone who deals with outside organisations on a regular basis needs MS Office. Who else?
Me: Okay.... well, you need to consider if less than 100% compatibility with existing files is a problem. Things like spreadsheets, big fancy documents...
PHB: Spreadsheets? OK, so the finance people need MS Office. Any others?
Me: Well, engineering say that having to deal with different formats internally will be a PITA...
PHB: So we get MS Office for the engineers....
Me: Right, you do realise that there's only one license being saved now?
Most people don't use "value for money" when they're deciding who to vote for.
They might use "lowest taxes", or they might use "best services" as criteria (and hence it's these things that politicians tend to cater for in their campaigns) but it is most unusual for a party to assume power on a platform of "We've done some research and we're pretty sure we can provide far more efficient services and deliver tax cuts into the bargain".
Watch "Yes, minister" for an idea as to why this may be the case....
Mostly they want it in Word so they can remove your contact info and add theirs. It prevents the client company from screwing them over by contacting you directly. Which seems pretty reasonable. Unfortunately they are usually extremely careless so my beautifully formatted resume becomes an unreadable mess in the process.
They seldom accept a CV in another format (eg. PDF) with contact info removed, however. So I don't believe that for one second.
I am told the main reason for them being in word is their database will only index word documents.
No, GP is right. The great majority of recruitment agents in the UK are a particularly braindead human implementation of grep.
Though IME completely rewriting the CV is unusual. Reformatting is, however, the norm and they won't accept a CV in anything other than Word format.
Considering this bank openly admits that they can see all the information on their screen as soon as they've got your account details and they just make up a security question on the spot based on those details, I'd say that's a dangerous assumption.
Another bank I know, the computer makes up the security questions and the person in the call centre just relays them and keys in the answer the customer gives. Too many wrong answers, and computer says no.
See Isaac Asimov for the exact quote, but it basically says robots may not harm humans. Because the law is encoded *in the hardware* there's no way that it can be altered.
Very noble, very pure, very useless when your robot doesn't have any intelligence and just executes commands blindly.
In a manner of speaking, it's both.
The internet banking system gives access to account history without requiring a token, which means the last step of the authentication when telephone banking becomes trivial to overcome. But at the same time, I can think of plenty of good reasons why I wouldn't want my account history to get into anyone else's hands - not least of which is it's none of their business.
My bank (and I'm also in the UK) has recently taken to sending me emails. Complete with "click here to check your account" links.
Yes, I've checked. They were genuine, not a phishing attempt.
Yes, I asked my bank what the hell they thought they were doing.
No, I didn't get a sensible reply.
I am told this is the case in some countries.
In many, however, it is the exception rather than the rule. My bank's just issued me a security token (yay!) but they, er, don't use it for the logon process. They only use it for transferring money out of the account.
Which is well and good but the telephone banking system quite often relies on a question like "Can you name a recent transaction on your account please?".
It was published in a British journal - though I don't know where the research took place - and HFCS is quite unusual in most of the EU so it may not be that.
Though glucose syrup is certainly ubiquitous in sweet things sold in the UK and is apparently normally made from corn or wheat, it doesn't have a particularly high fructose content.
You don't even need the notice; every bloody thing you write is copyrighted unless explicitly released into the public domain. That's one of the many screwed-up things about US copyright law; you can have copyrighted material which gives you no indication as to who owns the copyright, let alone how to contact them.
You don't in the UK either, but it's generally advised that you do put a copyright notice on because it's effectively a big sign saying "This is my work. I know my rights", which will immediately eliminate the (admittedly somewhat flimsy) defence of "How was I to know it was under copyright?"
Caution: IANAL.
I don't normally reply to AC's, and I'm sure I'll get modded downward for this, but this is actually one of the good things about the DMCA (which wouldn't have applied here because it's a British artist and therefore almost certainly the UK arm of Warner Music).
AIUI, the DMCA allows the person whose website/blog/whatever is taken down to write to the service provider basically saying "They don't have copyright. Please reinstate the site. I'll take any consequences" and as soon as they do that, the provider is absolved of any responsibility. No need to go to court to resolve the issue, this mechanism is actually written into the law. Such a law doesn't exist in the UK.
If it were up to the RIAA, artists wouldn't be allowed to stream their own urine.
Artists don't stream their own urine. They haven't needed to - the RIAA have been taking the piss for years.
AIUI, the DMCA does allow for people whose work is wrongly yanked to write a letter back basically saying "It's mine, I own the copyright and will take responsibility for any consequences" and it should go back up.
But I would point out one big hairy issue here - Edwyn Collins is Scottish. Any agreement he'd have had with Warner was most likely with Warner UK, not Warner USA. So the DMCA wouldn't have been used here.
wish I hadn't commented now, that deserves to be modded to the sky and back.
Communication skills are overrated. Those people that are willing to listen always get the message. It's only when people are too deeply entrenched in their own way of thinking that communication skills are really valuable. Most ideas are simple anyway and if well understood, then they can be easily transmitted.
Oh boy.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you're either relatively young (probably not much older than 25), you've been fantastically lucky or both.
The world (particularly where specialist knowledge is concerned) is absolutely chock-full of people who have the knowledge down to a fine art and can apply it all day every day beautifully.
The number of people who truly understand it and are able to communicate it in clear, layman's terms is drastically lower.
I find a certain delicious irony in noting that you were able to explain your point of view beautifully. To me, this suggests that you're not the kind of person that would find communication to be a big problem in the first place.
How about Isaac Newton? Neurotic, no communications skills, died a virgin.
Paul Erdos? Maybe the greatest mathematician ever but no life skills at all.
etc.
Which is great for them. Really, it is.
But let's be honest, if you're reading this you are not the next Isaac Newton. And you never will be.
That kind of ability comes about a couple of times in a generation. If you (or anyone) is going to be part of some fantastic discovery which will change the world, the immense likelihood is that you'll be making that discovery as part of a team effort. Which requires communication.
Find someone who CAN do that, and have them do so, for a cut of the result.
Different people are good at different things. Why is communication so highly valued in areas where it is not essential?
Probably because in order to get your team to do what you want them to do (rather than a poorly-conceived misunderstanding of what you want them to do) requires communication.
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.
Not necessarily. 500 words is actually very little. If you want to get a couple of points across in 500 words, it forces you to write clearly and concisely - and having seen some of the dross written by supposedly educated people, "ability to write clearly and concisely" is definitely something to be encouraged.
Really?
Can we agree that a 10 year old mac would be one released around Q4 1999?
If this page is accurate, the iMac G3/400 was released on October 4 1999. Which would meet the minimum specs for OS X 10.4, albeit only just. Had you pushed the boat out and bought a PowerMac, you'd have a processor with a similar raw clock speed only it'd be a G4 rather than a G3.
Now, according to mozilla.org, Firefox 3.5 requires OS X 10.4.
Of course, this is taking things to an extreme because few people would consider a 10-year old computer to offer a great deal of useful life, but to claim that PCs have a 2.5x longer support life is just downright lying.